Collage and Literature

Collage and Literature: The Persistence of Vision analyzes how and why
the history of literature and art changed irrevocably beginning in the
early years of the ­t wentieth century, and what that change has meant for
late modernism and postmodernism. Starting from Pablo Picasso’s 1912
gesture, breaking the fundamental logic of representation, of pasting a
piece of oilcloth onto a canvas, and moving up to Kenneth Goldsmith’s
2015 reading of an autopsy report of an unarmed young black man shot
by police (which he framed as a poem entitled “Michael Brown’s Body”),
this volume moves through a series of case studies encapsulating issues
of juxtaposition and framing, the central ways I identify collage. Its the-
sis is that collage—and, in fact, only collage—meaningfully overcomes
formal and generic boundaries between the literary and the nonliterary.
The overwriting of these traditional boundaries happens in the service
of collage’s a­ nti-­narrative drive, a drive that may be, in turn, interruptive
or destructive.
The expansion of collage’s horizons— broadly, to include the use of
radical juxtaposition in the arts—reveals a surprisingly wide range of
­A merican artists and writers using the logic of juxtaposition as they
imagine new worlds, disrupt accepted narratives about society and art,
and create meaning through form as much as through paraphrasable
content. In addressing a wide range of contested issues, recent artists re-
alize the shocking force of collage. By recovering this shock, Collage and
Literature: The Persistence of Vision restores collage to its multimedia
origins in order to reveal its powerful and political affects.

Scarlett Higgins received her PhD in 2005 from the University of Chicago
in English Language and Literature. She is currently an Associate Professor
at the University of New Mexico in the English Language and Literature
Department, and Chair of the Women Studies program. She has published
articles in The Langston Hughes Review, The Review of C ­ ontemporary
Fiction, Arizona Quarterly, and Textual Practice and chapters in Black
Music, Black Poetry (Ashgate, 2014), Evaluation: US Poetry after
1950 (University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming), and The Critical
­Experience (forthcoming).
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

46 Writing for the Masses

Dorothy L. Sayers and the Victorian Literary Tradition
Christine Colon

47 Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature

Musical Modernism
Katherine O’Callaghan

48 Ulysses and Faust

Tradition and Modernism from Homer till the Present
Harry Redner

49 Lorca’s Legacy
Essays in Interpretation
Jonathan Mayhew

50 The Early Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art

Willard Bohn

51 Bringing Up War Babies

The Wartime Child in Women’s Writing and Psychoanalysis
1930–1960
Amanda Jane Jones

52 Unlocking the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

Heart Mysteries
Daniel Tompsett

53 Collage and Literature

The Persistence of Vision
Scarlett Higgins

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

Collage and Literature
The Persistence of Vision

Scarlett Higgins
First published 2019
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The right of Scarlett Higgins to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: The End(s) of Collage 1

1 Collage Form and Collage Theory 21

2 Logical Sentiment 55

3 A Private Public Sphere 97

4 Recycled Images 134

5 Cryptic Versions 167

Conclusion 211

Bibliography 245
Index 263
Acknowledgments

This book started as a dissertation written under Robert von H ­ allberg.

Though many years have passed since then, my acknowledgments must
start with this intellectual debt. Deborah Nelson, James Lastra, and
Kenneth Warren all played significant roles in my development as a
scholar, and thus my continued work on this project. In the intervening
years, I have had many collaborators and compatriots, too many to list
here, but I am grateful to all for the ideas and the friendship.
I wish to thank Michelle Salyga and Timothy Swenarton at ­Routledge for
their assistance in bringing this book to publication, as well as my anony-
mous readers, whose many suggestions greatly improved the manuscript.
A previous version of Chapter 3 appeared as “A Private Public Sphere:
Robert Duncan and Jess's Cold War Household” in Arizona Quarterly,
Vol. 70, No. 4, Winter 2014, reprinted by permission of Arizona Quar-
terly and the Arizona Board of Regents.
A previous version of the first half of Chapter 5 appeared as “How
Long Must We Wait: Langston Hughes’s Cryptic Collage” in The
Langston Hughes Review, Vol. 23, 2009, reprinted by permission of
The Langston Hughes Review and The Langston Hughes Society.
A previous version of the second half of Chapter 5 appeared as
­“Nathaniel Mackey’s ‘Song of the Andoumboulou’: Making Differ-
ent Music:” in Black Music, Black Poetry: Blues and Jazz’s Impact on
­African American Versification (2014; Gordon E. Thompson, editor),
reprinted by permission of Taylor and Francis.
Unpublished material from the Robert Duncan papers, reprinted
with permission from the University of California—Berkeley’s Bancroft
Library.
Selected excerpts from The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1996), Splay An-
them (2006) by Nathaniel Mackey, and Selected Poems (1997) by R ­ obert
Duncan, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Selected excerpts from “Dante Etudes” from Robert Duncan: The
Collected Later Poems and Plays (2014), reprinted by permission of The
University of California Press.
viii Acknowledgments
Selected excerpts from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 10,” The School
of Udhra © 2001 by Nathaniel Mackey, reprinted with the permission of
The Permission Company, Inc., on behalf of City Lights, www.citylights.
com.
Selected excerpts from “Book of the Dead” from The Collected Po-
ems of Muriel Rukeyser (2005), reprinted by permission of International
Creative Management, on behalf of Bill Rukeyser.
Selected excerpts from “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” from THE
COMPLETE POEMS OF MARIANNE MOORE by Marianne Moore,
copyright © 1981 by Clive E. Driver, Literary Executor of the Estate of
Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of
Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
All rights reserved.
Selected excerpts from “Cultural Exchange” and “Bird in Orbit” Ask
Your Mama, published in THE COLLECTED POEMS OF LANGSTON
HUGHES by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David
Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston
Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House
LLC. All rights reserved.
Selected excerpts from “Marriage” from The Complete Poems of
Marianne Moore reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Selected excerpts and images from Singularities © 1990 by Susan
Howe, reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Images from Marilyn Times Five (1973) by Bruce Conner, reprinted
by permission of The Conner Family Trust and The Kohn Gallery, Los
Angeles.
The Mouse’s Tale (1951–1954) by Jess © the Jess Collins Trust, used
by permission of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Gift of
Frederic P. Snowden) and The Jess Collins Trust.
The Enamord Mage: Translation #6 by Jess © the Jess Collins Trust,
used by permission of The de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of
San Francisco, and The Jess Collins Trust.
I would like to thank my parents, Patrick Higgins and Patricia
­Higgins, and my siblings, Hanae Nosti and Ryan Higgins, for their love
and support.
Matthew Hofer has been by my side since this project began and has
read every word of it with an editor’s eye (some of them many times!).
I dedicate it to him, and to our children, Andreas Johnson Hofer and
Stian Matthis Hofer. You three make this all worthwhile.
Introduction
The End(s) of Collage

This is a book about collage. That is to say, it is a book about ­juxtaposition,

disruption, and a fundamental sense of anti-narrativity: these factors to-
gether made collage “the single most revolutionary formal ­innovation in
artistic representation to occur in the twentieth century” (Ulmer 84).1
I will juxtapose this claim with one from David Antin, from his 1974
tour de force interview/monologue entitled “Some Questions about
­Modernism,” where he provocatively claims to

identify the underlying logic of collage with a strategy of presen-

tation rather than its habit of a multiplicity of parts. So I tend to
see Duchamp’s readymades and Arman’s “accumulations” as falling
within the limited conditions of collage. Certainly you can imagine
as limiting cases the unconditional presentation of a single thing or
the presentation of the same thing over and over and over and over
again.
(214)

The question of how juxtaposition can be the primary identifying factor

of collage when a single object like a Duchampian readymade can also
be seen as a part of its purview is one that I will start to answer in the
course of this introduction, which ends with a schema of critical cate-
gories within which I read and explain the works in the chapters that
follow.
In this impertinent spirit, I will begin at the end: collage is the end-
game of literature. Or, to be more precise, it is the endgame of “the
literary.”2 William Carlos Williams’s thirty-year retrospective analysis
of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as “wip[ing] out our world as
if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it” (174) —insensitivity and
animus notwithstanding—was prescient. The cumulative effect of the
associated techniques of juxtaposition in literary writing after Eliot’s
work has been effective in erasing the “literary” as a distinctive cate-
gory of artistic production. The primary marks of distinction between
the literary and the nonliterary, those used to distinguish and elevate
one subset of the noninstrumental uses of language by designating them
2 Introduction
“literature” (including questions of form, style, content, and publication
venue), have, over the last century, been negated or shown to be merely
ornamental through the artistic innovations of those using many and
varied techniques of juxtaposition as a means to extract art from the
grip of the mimetic and the narrative. 3
This is not a tragedy, but it does constitute a perceptible shift in terms
of what “counts” as a form of noninstrumental artistic production in
language. In this book, I am concerned to investigate what has led up
to this shift: the continually varied transformation of the literary as well
as the visual arts through the revolutionary use of juxtaposition, begin-
ning in the early years of the twentieth century and continuing into the
twenty-first. From a contemporary perspective, what will come next still
remains to be seen, as well as the relation of “what comes next” to the
formal strategies that I discuss in the chapters to follow, or whether it
will be something entirely new, or something entirely old. Although those
concerned with a craft-based notion of the literary might have cause to
protest this revolution in the very concept of the artwork, the intellectual
challenges put forward from these works more than hold their own.
This book will present a progressive, threefold argument, whose as-
pects are interrelated yet distinct. This argument is as follows: (1) though
collage combines aspects of both form and genre, in text-based works, it
has functioned to destroy both of these as effective barriers between the
literary and the nonliterary; (2) collage is importantly anti-­narrative, both
in terms of the presentation of its content and in its formal structures;
(3) precisely these structures of collage, as they tend toward disrupting
genre-specific boundaries and causal narration, have made collage pecu-
liarly favorable for the transmission of political critique. I will elaborate
all three aspects of my argument in the following paragraphs.
Collage combines aspects of both form and genre (both already remark-
ably tricky concepts to pin down). The term “collage” describes both a
process of working with textual materials —which is to say, a formal
­strategy—and also a presentational mode that invites specific reader/
viewer expectations, as a genre does.4 In terms of literary history, the
function of collage has been to destroy both form and genre as coherent
boundaries for cordoning off the literary. By this, I do not mean to propose
that the concepts of “form” and “genre” no longer have any meaning for
our contemporary moment. Rather, it is the case that for the most intellec-
tually provocative artistic works, the ideas of “form” and “genre” can no
longer be used to enforce (artificial) barriers dividing works deemed prop-
erly “literary” from those that are not. The more successful collage has
been in making inroads to the mainstream of not only art and literature
but also advertising and popular culture, the more evident has become its
tendency to eviscerate the very boundaries that it relies upon to inform its
juxtapositions. This is how the most important aesthetic innovation of the
twentieth century also signaled the end of the literary.
 Introduction  3
The second part of my argument, regarding the anti-narrativity of
collage, is easiest to see through an examination of content, but it also
holds true with regard to form. Collage disrupts the tendency of teleo-
logically and causally oriented “stories” to remain stable and serve an
explanatory function that blocks innovative thinking, and ways of re-
imagining the world. Some writers, for instance, have harnessed this
power in order to disrupt the accepted narratives about a given situation
or a group of people (as Muriel Rukeyser attempts to do, for instance,
regarding the silicosis-infected miners in “The Book of the Dead”) to
help those individuals tell their truth in an entirely new way. The power
to allow an individual to rethink his world as “given” is literary art’s
most fundamental critical power. Yet, mimetic, absorptive literature
too often cedes this power and remains satisfied with re-presenting the
world as it appears. The juxtapositional force of collage, taken broadly,
is to be disruptive of not just one given narrative but rather the larger
formal and generic claims of narrative as a whole. This is one way that a
piece like a Duchampian readymade (or, as I will later discuss, one like
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day) can be understood within the definition of
collage. Collage’s political power has been to make new possibilities for
the world more readily available at both the macro- and microlevels. 5
As a result of the impact of the first two parts of the argument, I have
found that a wide range of American artists, working in forms as diverse
as poetry, prose, film, and the plastic arts, have used collage in order to
create expressly political art, an art whose politics inheres in the f­ ormal
strategies taken by its creators. By claiming a “political” impact for ­collage,
I mean to indicate one of two possibilities. In many cases, particularly in
the earlier years of the twentieth century, the artists in question believed
that their art could persuade individuals to alter their specific p
­ olitical be-
liefs, and even to take action. Perhaps more significantly, though, I argue
that collage is political in that it is meant to change individuals’ beliefs
concerning their entire worldview through a particularly pointed use of
images. That is, as art had formerly held to a largely mimetic sense of its
relation to the world—imitating the individual’s perspective, as if out of
a window—the breaking of that coherence is meant to shock the viewer
or reader into the ability to view his or her world in a new way, one that
could then lead to revolutionary change.6 One of the major tasks of this
project is to render visible what has become ­transparent for the viewer of
mass visual culture, to denaturalize reception.
This project is fundamentally against taxonomies: I believe that we
learn more about this flexible, creative, and disruptive art form by being
inclusive rather than exclusive. I argue in this book for a holistic concept
of collage as juxtaposition, specific enough in procedural terms to be
distinctive without inviting abstraction and generalization. Here, I have
adopted a similar approach to what Craig Dworkin employs with his
curated UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, that “a particular
4 Introduction
poem might have more in common with a particular music score, or
film, or sculpture than with another lyric” (Against Expression xxiii).
Though the genres and traditions from which Dworkin selected for his
online anthology are more diverse than those found in this largely text-
based book, it has been my contention throughout the process of writing
it that the omnibus artistic techniques developed in the early years of the
twentieth century in literature, visual arts, and film, as well as music/
sound, performance, and so forth, would be better understood through
a process of collection and self-same juxtaposition than through the
typical academic moves of taxonomy and dissection. Modernist col-
lage ­artists understood this well. As Eliot claims in “The Function of
­Criticism,” “Comparison and analysis… are the chief tools of the critic”
(75). Likewise, Ezra Pound states:

You can’t judge any chemical’s action merely by putting it with more
of itself. To know it, you have got to know its limits, both what it is
and what it is not. What substances are harder or softer, what more
resilient, what more compact.
(ABC of Reading 60)

The general lack of knowledge about the way collage functions is due,
at least in part, to the tendency by critics to dissect a broad topic like
collage down into its smallest analyzable pieces in an attempt to ensure
accuracy. This does much to explain its transparency in our larger cul-
tural milieu.
As an attempt, in part, to broach this critical problem, as well as to
return collage to its formally diverse and intermedial beginnings, I have
purposefully presented readings of texts across the arts that use collage
in a wide variety of manners and for a wide variety of purposes. In de-
fining collage as the art of juxtaposition, fundamentally disruptive and
anti-narrative, I have left this overarching definition intentionally broad
in order to allow for a consideration of the greatest diversity of texts
possible. Along with Antin, I find the most significant aspect of collage,
one that extends well beyond the most recognizable “cut-and-paste” aes-
thetic, to be a “strategy of presentation.” This strategy of presentation
is reflected in two moments of activity: an artist’s choice of materials
and her work in shaping or manipulating those materials.7 This second
“action” may include those works that are self-consciously presented
with no—or at least a claim of no—shaping at all. This way of charac-
terizing collage functions across artistic forms and media; that is, while
there are certainly technical differences between how, say, a filmmaker
and a writer manipulate their respective material, those differences are
matters of craft. (There are also, of course, differences between how
two individual filmmakers manipulate their material, or two individual
writers.) It’s not that I claim that those craft-based differences are of no
 Introduction  5
consequence; rather, I claim that while extensive analysis of the craft-
based details concerning how individual practitioners work in a specific
medium might provide a great deal of knowledge about the work of a
given artist (and the evidence for this can be seen in the extensive schol-
arship on collage practitioners such as Marianne Moore, Susan Howe,
and Joseph Cornell), it does not provide generalizable knowledge about
how the formal strategy of collage as juxtaposition functions across the
arts. One symptom of the tendency toward dissection of various craft-
based differences among various practitioners using juxtapositional
formal strategies is the proliferation of terms that can be gleaned from
reading the critical literature about these figures: collage, of course, but
also montage and assemblage, and then mosaic, sampling, appropria-
tion, quotation, plagiarism, and even, in some cases, translation are all
terms that critics have used to distinguish various forms of juxtaposition
as a formal strategy. Though the critics who have produced these dis-
crete terms describing the work of individual artists use significant and
precise distinctions to justify their choices, this precision has been pro-
duced at the cost of a blockage in the holistic sense of collage’s central
importance in the arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This blockage exists despite the rapid spread and subsequent per-
sistence of collage not only in art and literature but also throughout mass
media, including televised news and government propaganda. The story
of collage is something everyone feels like they already know, like how
to “read” a novel or “watch” a movie, a form of naturalization ­without
­enervation. The mistaken concept that collage is of concern only for
those few enamored of avant-garde art has, in part, led to a peculiar lack
of critical attention. Alternately, the sheer prevalence of the formal as-
pects of collage throughout the media (the fast-paced montage of images
that is nearly ubiquitous in commercials is only one example) has made it
a blind spot for contemporary culture. The very force of collage—to per-
suade without appearing to do so—has given it precisely the power it had
originally been intended to combat, when its content has been reduced to
that of selling corporate products or government policies.
The desire for unmediated expression and the ideal of a world free
from hierarchical relationships—whether expressed in government or
grammar—is the key to the revolutionary potential of collage. This is a
medium’s way of pretending that it is not one. Collage can be a p ­ owerful
instrument of propaganda for those inclined to use it as such; its power
is strengthened because it can function unnoticed. As I stated, despite
its prevalence and persistence across various media, collage itself has
attracted surprisingly little rigorous scholarship. Art historians have
produced the bulk of the scholarship on collage, though the majority of
these critical works focus on collage in the visual arts exclusively.8 Two
texts of the 1960s loom large in critical understanding of collage: Herta
Wescher’s monumental and deeply historical Collage (1968), which
6 Introduction
details this formal strategy from its precedents as far back as the s­ ixteenth
century up through the mid-twentieth century, and W ­ illiam Seitz’s The
Art of Assemblage (1961), the catalog accompanying his ­Museum of
Modern Art exhibit from the same year. Seitz, unlike most other art
historians writing on this topic, understands his subject as fully interme-
dial, devoting sections of his analysis to “The Liberation of Words” and
“The Realism and Poetry of Assemblage.” Seitz argues that “the practice
of assemblage raises materials from the level of formal relations to that
of associational poetry, just as numbers and words, on the contrary, tend
to be formalized” (84). Other significant studies of collage include that
by Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, who describe the way that collage’s
materials “have not only presence but highly complex presence, retain-
ing memories of a previous existence that overlays their present use like
images in a double-exposed photograph” (146). Likewise, in her book
Collage, Montage, and the Found Object, Diane Waldman contends
that collage allows for “greater formal diversity and an increased expres-
sive range… [capturing] some of the most momentous shifts in culture,
politics, and economics and can thus be said to present a compelling
historical record of our time” (8). Brandon Taylor’s Collage: the Making
of Modern Art (2004) argues that “[c]ollage in the fine arts allows us to
see that it is somewhere in the gulf between the bright optimism of the
official world and its degraded material residue, that many of the exem-
plary, central experiences of modernity exist” (8). The museum catalog
Collage: Assembling Contemporary Art (2008) contains an essay by
Ian Monroe claiming that collage “becomes a tool to critique or engage
with modern cultural conditions and belief… What is unique to collage,
then, is that the artist—and, in turn, their ­audience—are confronted
with the phenomenology of difference…” (45). These texts all emphasize
the complexity of collage’s images and how those images interact, in a
manner both immediate and deep, with the culture from which they
emanate; the complexity of collage’s relationship to culture is one that I
pursue in my discussion in this book as well.
Several extant articles and book chapters from art historians attempt
to comprehend theoretically how collage functions, though, as with the
more historical pieces, only in the visual arts. In his essay, “Collage: The
Organizing Principle of Art in the Age of the Relativity of Art,” Donald
Kuspit claims that collage’s significance lies in the fact that “[t]here is no
clear-cut, single ground of art in the collage: art is no longer either repre-
sentational… or abstract… It is a creative, subjective choice of elements
emblematic of being in general” (44). Kuspit continues to characterize
the force of collage as destroying “the idea that life is a stable whole,
indivisible—or rather, that the division of life will destroy it. Life still ex-
ists in fragments which afford new opportunities for experiencing it, new
opportunities for finding meaning in it” (53). Rosalind Krauss, in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, develops
 Introduction  7
what is perhaps the most thoroughgoing theoretical e­ xploration of the sig-
nificance of collage in the visual arts. Krauss argues that the significance
of collage lies in “the insistence of figure/ground reversal and the con-
tinual transposition between negative and positive form deriv[ing] from
collage’s command of the structure of s­ ignification,” and its ­“systematic
play of difference” (34–5). The “ground” of art in collage, she states,
“enters our experience not as an object of perception, but as an object of
discourse, of representation” (38). What is particularly significant about
Krauss’s discussion here is that she breaks away from one of the standard
lines of argument about collage’s significance: that by including objects
from the “real world” (or those that gesture unmistakably to the world),
collage brings the “world” into “art.” Rather, she argues, collage turns
“the world” into yet another form of “re-presentation” through its in-
corporation into art. Both of these theorists emphasize the significance
of collage’s “breaking the frame” of the formerly “unified” work of art,
though they differ somewhat on the nature of its impact.
Scholarship on the use of collage as a formal strategy in literary works
has come primarily from two sources: one from the books of a small
coterie of scholars of modernism, who have devoted brief, if insightful,
sections of monographs—usually on the avant-garde or the practice of
“quotation”—to the subject of collage; the other would be equally brief
sections from studies on individual artists who were well-known prac-
titioners of collage. Examples of the first type include Marjorie Perloff’s
The Futurist Moment (1986), which contains a chapter entitled “The
Birth of Collage.”9 Perloff is the literary scholar who has done the most
to develop the idea of collage as it pertains to literary texts; she has writ-
ten about this topic throughout her career, from The Futurist Moment,
to The Dance of the Intellect (1996), to Unoriginal Genius (2010). In
“The Birth of Collage,” Perloff does an excellent job of tracking this
“birth” out of Cubist painting, and her treatment of it here is perhaps the
finest and most carefully considered one on literary collage as a general
topic. The invention of collage, she argues,

meant, of course, a radical questioning of existing modes of

representation
… On the visual level, collage entails the loss of a coherent pic-
torial image; on the verbal, the loss of what David Antin calls “the
stronger logical relations” between word groups in favor of those
of similarity, equivalence, and identity… In collage, hierarchy gives
way to parataxis….
(75)

She continues: “as a mode of detachment and readherence, of graft and

citation, collage inevitably undermines the authority of the individual
self, the ‘signature’ of the poet or painter” (76). These two insights work
8 Introduction
together to emphasize the radical decentering of literary collage, at the
level of grammar and of authorship; in this view, collage fundamen-
tally reshapes how we understand language to work as an art form.
­Unoriginal Genius is in many ways an attempt to understand the legacy
of collage among writers who do not use a “cut-and-paste” aesthetic. In
collage as well as the twenty-first century practices of appropriation and
citation that Perloff discusses here, “context always transforms content”
(48). This is an observation that pithily brings home the overarching
impact that juxtapositional formal strategies have had across the arts.
Two other books by literary scholars have attempted to address the
topic of collage across various media: David Banash’s Collage Culture:
Readymade, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption (2013), which, as its
title suggests, thoroughly engages with a topic to which I have only occa-
sionally referred—the use of collage in the mass media and ­advertising—
and Rona Cran’s Collage in Twentieth-Century Art, ­Literature, and
Culture (2014). Banash’s observation that “[t]he critical force of collage
is bound up with the ontology of its materials” (143) is consonant with
Perloff’s analysis of context, as well as the various discussions of the
interaction of collage with culture more generally. Cran claims compel-
lingly that “[c]ollage is about encounters… offering a range of possible
associations between text and image” (4), and the sense of the central
significance of juxtaposition here is one that I pursue throughout this
book, though without Cran’s time- and space-based focus on those prac-
titioners living in New York at mid-century.
The most serious, comprehensive attempt to theorize the historical
avant-garde and, to some extent, its legacy in the art world is Peter
­Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984). Beginning from the thesis
that the formal techniques of collage and montage are the anchor points
of any consideration of the avant-garde, Bürger takes Walter Benjamin’s
theory of allegory as an initial entry into an analysis of what he calls the
“non-organic work of art” (68). The crucial aspects of Benjamin’s theory
that Bürger carries over into the avant-garde context are the gesture of
fragmentation that the artist performs, “pull[ing] one element out of the
totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function,” and
what he terms the “posited meaning” of allegory, which results from
the allegorist having “join[ed] the isolated reality fragments and thereby
creat[ed] meaning,” a meaning that does not “derive from the original
context of the fragments” (69). I am not convinced by Bürger’s assertion
that the fragments used in collage are deprived of their original meaning
entirely, though certainly the juxtapositional power of collage will shift
that meaning (sometimes dramatically) in its new context. For instance,
to take up one of Bürger’s own examples, Picasso’s choice to use legi-
ble scraps of newspaper in his Still Life with Newspaper and Packet of
­Tobacco (1914), as opposed to any other piece of paper of graphic inter-
est, has significant repercussions for the reception of the painting. Thus,
 Introduction  9
the context of the news story in its historical moment, far from being
evacuated, is subsumed into the work as a whole. Rather than having no
meaning at all, the fragments of collage take on a double meaning—part
from their previous discrete existence and part from their integration in
the new work.
The perception that the collection of formally innovative aesthetic
works that originated in the early years of the twentieth century, and its
legacy that reaches into the twenty-first, has little relevance to those inter-
ested in the sociopolitical life of the general populace is at least partially to
blame for the lack of critical attention to collage. Claims that the stylistic
difficulty of this work made it elitist in an exclusionary way have contrib-
uted to this lack. On the contrary, I contend that each of the artists whose
work I consider believed or believes passionately that modes of aesthetic
perception can change the experience of everyday life, and that collage is
the form best suited to this goal. Collage has often been used as a peda-
gogic tool, one through which it is possible to transmit many different and
complex ideas or images, quickly and efficiently. The fact that the process
might be difficult was taken for granted; that there would be a sufficient
audience for the message was assumed as well. The sheer prevalence of
collage’s use as a formal strategy (apart from any artistic merit) through-
out the mass media indicates that its formal aspect is not thought to be
too difficult for a majority of people to comprehend. Film and television
have increased our visual literacy as a culture to the point where, it would
seem, collage forms in the moving image (usually a straightforward type
of montage) are taken for granted. It is, in fact, the basic language of the
moving image; so much so that, I would argue, the impact of collage has
become almost entirely transparent and, barring any serious efforts by
the artist to impress upon his audience the seriousness of collage’s ability
to persuade or naturalize argumentation into a kind of self-evident real-
ization, it passes by nearly, if not entirely, unnoticed, part of the general
static of media-saturated consumer culture.
The erosion of the border between the literary and the nonliterary—
or “art” and “life”—was, under other circumstances, the goal of the
historical avant-garde groups as well as many innovative artists who fol-
lowed in their wake. The imagined end of this struggle was to be an Eden
in which art washed over life. Few, if any, seem to have considered that
the result would be the reverse: the mundane instrumentality of daily
life has now ultimately subsumed, or, in many cases, been transformed
into, art. Yet, this seems to be increasingly the case, as the two major for-
mally experimental groups of writers to emerge in the first two decades
of the twenty-first century, those affiliated with Flarf and the conceptual
writers, both typically produce work that is immersed in and derived
from quotidian yet instrumental uses of language. Both, as I will argue,
produce their work in a manner that is related to the lineage of collage as
juxtaposition that I will trace here.
10 Introduction
The Flarfists’ relation to collage is a direct one: the most basic ­version
of their procedure involves using the search engine Google as a type
of language-generating constraint via the input of keyword searches
consisting of unlikely combinations of words, a procedure known as
­“Google sculpting.” Through “Google sculpting,” Flarfists generate
textual material in the form of quotations that the search engine pulls
from various websites; these phrases become the raw material that the
poet then shapes and sculpts. This and other, related, procedures recall
nothing so insistently as the famous dictum of Surrealism, borrowed
from Lautréamont, that it could be characterized as the “fortuitous en-
counter upon a dissecting table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella”
(Maldoror 263).10 Flarf poems tend to revel in what could generously
be ­characterized as the “bad taste” of the Internet: they are rude, tacky,
kitschy, “un-P.C.,” and motivatedly unliterary, with lines such as “Oh My
PetPet! This is Pork, my Zebbra!” (Deggentesh Flarf 34); ­“Phallocentric
chicks:/ they dig guys with big wars” (Gardner Flarf 72); and “… eating
kittens is just plain/… heartless, mean-spirited” (Mohammad 37; ellipses
in original). These texts clearly rely upon the most basic, “cut-and-paste”
version of collage as a formal strategy (though generated via twenty-first
century means) to provoke an intense reaction through their recourse to
surprising, if not shocking, diction and syntax. K. Silem Mohammad’s
“Peace Kittens,” quoted earlier, uses the troubling phrases turned up on
the Internet through searches generated from the terms “peace” (a noble,
if utopian, sentiment) and “kitten” (embodiment of the “cuteness” factor
generally considered benign and pleasant if occasionally cloying). The
resultant poem accommodates sentiments ranging from the amusingly
startling to the genuinely disturbing: “… the kittens that were protected
in the blazing oven/… sleeping in heaven, surrounded by song” or “… I
murder kittens and smear their blood over the walls” (37). Flarf poetry
such as this is forthrightly intended to disturb (in the literal sense of “to
throw into disorder”), both in its surface-level content as well as in its
affront to the status of the literary, what Charles Bernstein has termed
“Official Verse Culture.” (Flarfist Michael Magee has maintained a Flarf
blog entitled “Mainstream Poetry.”) Its use of materials that are openly
and intentionally culled from the Internet, a source that is demotic in
nature, even if it is not nearly as democratic as it either claims to be or
its most ardent supporters would like, nevertheless produces texts that
introduce alterations in vocabulary and tone that are unprecedented at
least in the length and intensity that the Flarfists have sustained them.
This major shift that can be tracked in groups of formally experi-
mental writers toward an intense immersion in mundane, everyday
­material is one that was detailed by Goldsmith in an October 2013 arti-
cle, ­published in The New Yorker (not necessarily the typical bastion of
either formal experimentation or demotic literary forms), entitled “The
Writer as Meme Machine.” In this article, he—inspired by a blog post
 Introduction  11
written by media critic Darren Wershler (also a conceptual writer) from
April 2012—compares the most recent productions to come out of con-
ceptual writing with other online offerings, quite similar in content yet
not framed as artistic productions. These include the “Horse_ebooks”
Twitter feed; a collection of text messages all mistakenly sent to the
­novelist Leila Sales (but meant for others named Leila); and the “419
eater” website, a project dedicated to revenge on Advance Fee Fraud
perpetrators. One of the perhaps unintended consequences of the use
of such Internet-driven techniques by both groups is that “[p]oetry
isn’t ­currently a driver of culture but a symptom” (“Best Before Date”
npn). This claim represents a reversal of the centuries-long assumption
that ­poetry’s value resides, at least in part, in being the “driver” of our
culture, or, as Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed in his “Defence of Poetry”
(written in 1821, published posthumously in 1840), “poets are the unac-
knowledged legislators of the world” (46). This sense that poets should
be the leaders of culture and not its followers is the inspiration for the
use of the term “avant-garde” as a description for those involved in the
most advanced, “avant” literary and artistic practices.11
Poetry’s symptomatic position, and the concomitant erosion of the
­“literary” as an elevated status, is evidenced by the fact that writers work-
ing with such constraints and procedures choose texts for appropriation
for reasons other than their literary qualities. Wershler claims that texts
­chosen for appropriation by writers like Goldsmith (and h ­ imself) may
have no particular literary qualities, or, by chance, they may be found to
have some traditionally literary or rhetorical qualities, but this is not the
cause for their appropriation. Rather, he asserts, conceptual writers and
others acting similarly appropriate their chosen texts “in order to focus
attention on the qualities of the genres that we use to convey that peculiar
invention of modernity called ‘information’” (“Best Before Date” npn).
As Goldsmith diagnoses the situation,

Quality is beside the point—this type of content is about the quan-

tity of language that surrounds us, and about how difficult it is to
render meaning from such excesses. In the past decade, writers have
been culling the Internet for material, making books that are more
focused on collecting than on reading. These ways of writing—word
processing, databasing, recycling, appropriating, intentionally pla-
giarizing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming to name
just a few—have traditionally been considered outside the scope of
literary practice.
(“Meme Machine” npn)

While most of the techniques that Goldsmith enumerates—or previous

and related versions of them—are a part of the lineage of collage that
I analyze in this book, he is certainly correct in stating that they are
12 Introduction
all variously opposed to the craft-based notion of the writer as font of
creative, independent inspiration that has been the major basis for the
Euro- and Anglo-American traditions of the literary. What’s remark-
able in this simultaneous and parallel development of conceptual writing
and the “meme machine” that Wershler and Goldsmith delineate is the
near-indistinguishability, thanks to the leveling effects of education and
technology, between the products of those who frame their works as
“art” and those who do not.
So-called “outsider” art has always existed, and yet, the effect of the
ready availability of online self-publication venues alongside the eco-
nomic challenges to mainstream publishing that have made these ven-
ues attractive to “real” writers is the erasure of the difference between
those who are and who are not “real” writers.12 The examples that
Goldsmith gives, of books by conceptual writers lesser known than he,
do not contain a level of either artistic or intellectual interest—to this
reader—that exceed those of what Wershler terms “conceptualisms in
the wild.”13 The effect of technology has been, it seems, to realize the
prediction/­diagnosis/command that William S. Burroughs “borrowed”
from Tristan Tzara, who had “borrowed” it (again) from Lautréamont:
“poetry is for everyone.”14
The seemingly inevitable if also unforeseen consequences of both the
desired shock of collage and the interweaving of art and life, two pri-
mary goals of the early twentieth century avant-gardes, were exposed
in events unfolding in early 2015.15 On March 13, with his reading of
“The Body of Michael Brown” at the “Interrupt 3” conference at Brown
University, Goldsmith engaged in a public performance of what I term
collage as meta-textual juxtaposition that lays bare the limits of col-
lage, understood via Antin’s terminology of “a strategy of presentation.”
The reception of this act has, likewise, produced the type of shock that
the avant-gardists of the first half of the twentieth century predicted
and hoped collage would produce (though it’s difficult to imagine that
Goldsmith either predicted or hoped for precisely the type of shocked
outrage his performance elicited). “The Body of Michael Brown” con-
sisted of the nearly unaltered autopsy report of Michael Brown’s body as
filed by the Missouri state coroner and made publicly available over the
­I nternet.16 The objections of those who fiercely criticized Goldsmith for
this performance derive from two related aspects: the changes ­(however
slight) that he made to the autopsy report and the juxtaposition of
­Goldsmith’s particular body (and the privileges it confers) standing on
stage reading a text about the autopsy of Brown’s body. Goldsmith’s
most significant change to the autopsy report was the shift in position
of a single sentence: he moved to the end of the piece a sentence which
had been toward the middle of the original autopsy report describing
Brown’s genitalia as “unremarkable.” While the claims made by those
offended by Goldsmith’s performance are palpable—that he acted in
 Introduction  13
“complicity with the information system and racial national imaginary”
(Morris 107)—so are the counterarguments, which have been offered by
Goldsmith on social media as well as by a few critics.17
Responding, in part, to the defense of his reading Goldsmith posted
on Facebook, which describes his formal strategy as one that “‘tell[s] the
truth in the clearest and strongest way possible,’” Bob Perelman a­ rticulates
a shift in the perception of content’s significance in conceptual writing:
“rather than a matter of indifference, [content] is now something that has
to be communicated” (“Delivering Difficult News” 117). This shift lines
up with a larger one in Goldsmith’s artistic ­practice: a movement from
his “archival” projects (No. 110 10.4.93-10.7.93, No.  109 2.7.93-12.
15.93, 6799, Soliloquy, and Fidget) to Day, and his so-called “New
York” trilogy (Weather, Traffic, and Sports), and finally to the work
that directly preceded “The Body of Michael Brown,” Seven American
Deaths and Disasters (2013). This last text, composed of the transcripts
of live reportage surrounding seven iconic calamitous events of A ­ merican
history from the Cold War period forward, has provided the context
that both Goldsmith and those critics who have desired to defend “The
Body of Michael Brown” have used to do so. Goldsmith has claimed that
his public performance of this particular appropriated poem “could be
considered” the eighth installment of the project published in his 2013
book. Perelman describes how, in response to G ­ oldsmith’s defense of his
work, the artist here

is receiving no… allowance of critique. “The Body of Michael

Brown” may have been presented as art, but it is being received as
a gesture in an ongoing crisis… The artfulness of the poem dis-
solved, in its reception, into the content of what the person reciting
the poem was saying.
(118)

The key to understanding the gap between Goldsmith’s apparent inten-

tion with this piece and the reaction he has received is precisely in the
difference between the seven public deaths/disasters he appropriated in
his book and the individual calamitous event he appropriated in “The
Body of Michael Brown.”
Seven American Deaths and Disasters was created via a constraint that
each historical moment included must have available transcripts of live
news coverage: the book covers the assassinations of John F. ­Kennedy,
Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon; the explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; the C
­ olumbine,
Colorado school shooting; and the death of Michael J­ ackson.18 The press
covered each of these incidents on a national level. All four individuals
whose deaths are featured were famous public figures in their lifetimes;
the other events, routinely termed “tragedies,” entailed no variance or
14 Introduction
controversy concerning the tone and temper of the mass market national
news coverage, or in public opinion as was commonly and openly shared.
Finally, governmental institutions or authorities were not widely under-
stood to be perpetrators for any of them.19 None of these c­ ategories hold
with respect to the death of Michael Brown. 20 Moreover, Brown’s death
incited the extended protests that took place in Ferguson, Missouri over
the summer and fall of 2014. These paratextual and historical variants, as
compared with Goldsmith’s original seven deaths and disasters, are why
his performance was received as a part of an “ongoing crisis” and not as
an isolated aesthetic event. P ­ erelman’s claim that “The Body of Michael
Brown” “expresses a lineage… [in] a sequence of radical innovation”
(“Delivering Difficult News” 118) is accurate. However, the expressly
apolitical lineage of Duchamp and Warhol to which Goldsmith has, in
many public statements, professed his allegiance eschews concern with
content as content and thus does not provide a neat fit with his public per-
formance of “The Body of Michael Brown.” To be read as anything other
than extremely incongruous and co-optive, the performance necessitates
the presumption of a specifically “progressive” political intent (as de-
scribed by Daniel Morris). Whatever his personal feelings may have been,
this intent to provide a political critique is one that ­Goldsmith’s artistic
lineage does not overtly support. The shock provoked by Goldsmith’s
reading—the shock of the all-too-real being appropriated as art—is the
shock of collage as juxtaposition at its most visceral.
In the case studies that make up the remainder of this book, I have
attempted to address a wider spectrum of collage art and artists than
is typically presented together, whether that is due to questions of me-
dia, artistic style, or personal identity. I believe that there is more to
be learned about collage from a critical stance of inclusion rather than
­exclusion. While this methodology does seem to invite a nearly ­endless
list of potential inclusions (its greatest ostensible limitation), it also a­ llows
for fortuitous combinations and groupings of the type that ­collage itself
makes possible. In the process of studying these widely varying texts, I
have evinced the following wide-ranging categories:
– history/pedagogy: This type of collage works explicitly to change
minds and influence both perceptions and actions. The pedagogical in-
tention is usually directed toward the past and how it affects the present.
Its practitioners expose individuals or reveal events from the past that
are either unknown or poorly understood in the present. The funda-
mental purpose behind using collage as a pedagogical tool is to provoke
revelation without seeming to teach, allowing (or at least, appearing to
allow) the reader/viewer to come to a new understanding on his or her
own. This was one of the primary motivating factors behind the early
avant-garde use of collage, and I will discuss the pedagogical impulse in
early collage in much greater detail in the course of Chapter 1, in my dis-
cussion of Pound, whose work with the ideogram (in his critical prose as
 Introduction  15
well as The Cantos) is perhaps the fullest example of collage as history/­
pedagogy. Another primary example of this type of collage would be
Robert Duncan. Duncan’s sense that non-Western knowledge was an
enormous and untapped resource (derived from his Gnostic upbringing),
one that was hidden in plain sight if only one knew where to look for it,
is, as with Pound, a consistent theme throughout his writings in prose
as well as his poetic series, Passages, which I will discuss in Chapter 3.
– archeology/testimony: This type of collage contains within it a sense
of urgency usually related to a perceived wrongdoing to someone, or to
the sense that there exists something in the past—hidden—that must be
uncovered. Often, one may perceive this sense of urgency in the text even
when the event is understood to have occurred in the distant past. The
primary difference in this type of collage from the first is in the way in
which the artist views his or her relation to the material involved, which
is to say that the author takes it upon him or herself to respond to this in-
justice, or to the pain of another, as a personal responsibility even when
he or she is not directly affected. Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead”
(discussed in Chapter 2) performs perhaps the purest act of testimony,
on behalf of the silicosis-infected miners of Gauley Tunnel, among the
texts that I discuss. Rukeyser’s work involved personal contact with her
sources, as she traveled to the area in which this environmental disaster
took place in order to document it directly. Susan Howe and N ­ athaniel
Mackey (discussed in the Conclusion and Chapter 5, respectively) both
use archives—each of them estranged from dominant paradigms of
knowledge (in space and time)—in order to use collage poetry to bring
about a fundamental shift in understanding concerning the historical
past as a document of what Benjamin called “barbarism.”
– citation/revision: Citation sometimes refers to the use of a proper
quotation (whether “properly” cited or not), sometimes of merely a word
(naming a person, a place, a text), as a referential marker; in ­nonliterary
texts, the term may also refer to a musical citation of a melody or a visual
citation of an image. Citation may work similarly to “collage proper”
without the use of a cut-and-paste aesthetic; as the critical literature on
the “quoting poem” makes clear, it serves many of the same functions
without (sometimes) engaging with the visual aspects of ­collage. ­Revision
is a way of taking the given citation and using the power of collage to re-
make it through its presentation in a new context. As the old context re-
mains legible even as the new one shows through simultaneously, this is a
form of revision that fosters historical understanding even while p ­ utting
forward a utopian desire for change. Marianne Moore’s “ ­ Marriage” and
Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama (discussed in Chapters 2 and 5, re-
spectively) are both deeply citational works that exist largely as groups of
textual quotations and, in Hughes’s case, musical citations. Both of these
poems use citation as a force to produce a re-signification upon the mean-
ing of the texts, people, places, and events to which their varied citations
16 Introduction
refer, on topics (gender and race) that probe some of our nation’s most
deeply held beliefs. Paul D. Miller (working as DJ Spooky) cites and re-
vises D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a N
­ ation in Rebirth of a ­Nation (discussed
in the Conclusion of this book); his revision, produced in real time on
stage and accompanied by not only graphic additions but also live music,
serves to illuminate both Griffith’s still-shocking racism ­(apparent from a
viewing of the original film) and how Griffith’s innovations in film form
support and extend that racism.
– collection/repetition: Collection works to gather images or textual
material in order to focus on variation among similar items, and the
ways in which they change (either over time or space). Works in which
repetition is a dominant factor use multiple identical or similar images
as a way of foregrounding or denaturalizing something that tends to
pass by unnoticed in the world around us. The aggregation of such im-
ages allows for their analysis and understanding. The texts that fit into
this category are often (though not exclusively) concerned with objects
and images deriving from mass culture. Benjamin’s The Arcades Project
(discussed in Chapter 1) is a text that functions as a kind of “history”
of Paris in the nineteenth century, constructed through a collection of
quotations, organized (loosely) via broad themes. Joseph Cornell’s Rose
Hobart and Bruce Conner’s Marilyn Times Five are both films (as I will
discuss in Chapter 4) which extract images of a single female figure from
a single film and use the force of repetition and arrangement in order
to estrange viewers from commodified viewing of these images. Jess’s
first major paste-up, The Mouse’s Tale (discussed in Chapter 3) collects
a plethora of images of nude and nearly nude men, and through their
accumulation into an image within an image produces a figure of horror
rather than one of laughter.
– chance-driven/evacuative: The contours of these texts are deter-
mined, to a greater or lesser extent, through chance-driven operations.
The explicit intent by their makers is to remove the author’s/creator’s
personal ego from the text so that the text is in no way subsumable to
the author’s “emotions,” “experiences,” or “intentions.” Some of these
texts may contain content related to the author but be arranged in such a
way as to remove the author’s intent; others may contain content that the
author has obtained from somewhere else (“found” material). In either
case, these works are intently anti-expressive. Texts that would belong
in this category, such as those by John Cage and Burroughs, are not cov-
ered extensively in this book (due only to constraints of space). However,
the work of Goldsmith, as well as that of language poet Bruce Andrews,
is discussed in the Conclusion; both belong in this category, though not
precisely in the same way. While neither Andrews nor Goldsmith uses
explicitly chance-driven procedures in their work, both importantly
make specific procedures the basis for their compositional process, as
I discuss; as well, both effectively work to remove their personal ego
 Introduction  17
from the text (Goldsmith unambiguously; Andrews’s texts perform this
work—as I argue—though this is not an overt part of his poetics).
Though the works featured in each of the case studies potentially fit
into more than one of these categories, for the purposes of expediency,
I have assigned each figure to a single category. The chapters that fol-
low will develop through arguments that pay close attention to both
form and content for each individual text, thinking through how collage
functions in a given text, as well as to what ends it functions. I see this
structure as offering the virtue of open-endedness—that is to say, while
I intend to form the beginnings of an alternate genealogy of twentieth-
and twenty-first century art and literature, the works attended to here
are in no way supposed to be taken as the “canon” of collage. I would
hope and expect, that is, that this book could be exoteric rather than
esoteric, and that it would lead the way for more work that attempts to
understand how aesthetic reception affects perception.

Notes
1 The term collage is of course derived from the French verb “coller” which
means to paste, stick, or glue, as in the application of wallpaper to a wall. As
Marjorie Perloff notes in her article “Collage and Poetry,” the term is also
idiomatic French for an illicit sexual union, which certainly gets at the spirit
of impertinence and defiance important to most significant early ­collage texts.
In defining collage in a general way, I am deviating from the art-­historical
precedent to use the term solely to refer to visual texts involving the joining
of two or more unlike items in a flat plane. My decision to use collage as the
master term for this book also diverges from the tendency of some scholars to
favor the term “montage” (for instance, in Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-
garde as well as Susan Buck-Morss’s Dialectics of Seeing). The use of the term
montage in a general way unavoidably brings up the idea of Eisensteinian
montage, a particular variant that has a very specific meaning and history
(as I’ll discuss in Chapter 1). Perloff states: “it may be more useful to regard
collage and montage as two sides of the same coin, in view of the fact that the
mode of construction involved… is essentially the same,” and I fundamentally
agree, as I will detail in this introduction (“Collage and Poetry” npn).
2 By “literary,” I refer to those qualities of a given text which imply a sense of
timelessness (the Oxford English Dictionary refers to “superior or lasting
artistic merit”) as well as to the sense that “literary” works are cordoned off
from other, nonliterary uses of language through particular markers which
may include those of style, diction, syntax, form, and content.
3 For example, the most recent group to transform the lessons of collage,
the “conceptual writers,” rarely uses the words “poetry” or “literature” in
­describing itself or its products. Kenneth Goldsmith, the most visible among
the conceptual writers, prefers to think of himself as a “word processor” as op-
posed to a writer, eschewing notions of both originality and craft. This follows
on the lesson of its immediate predecessor in the American avant-garde, “lan-
guage centered writing,” more commonly referred to as the language poets.
4 Form and genre are terms that have lengthy, complicated, and interrelated
histories. Often, they are used nearly interchangeably with each other. Much
of even current thinking about form and genre can be traced back to the
18 Introduction
differences between Platonic and Aristotelian thoughts regarding the struc-
ture and function of poetic language. For my purposes here, “form” I take
to mean the particular structure of the text in question, at the levels of the
phoneme, word, phrase, sentence, and strophe (in a literary text), as well
as the ways in which this structure does or does not contain features that
make it readily comparable to other texts. “Genre” I take to indicate the
many and varied ways in which texts have been classified in their sociocul-
tural contexts. I agree with Fredric Jameson, who claims in The Political
­Unconscious that “[g]enres are essentially literary institutions, or social
contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify
the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (106). There are multiple
points at which these definitions of form and genre shade into and reflect
back on each other. For the remainder of this book, I will be discussing form
extensively and genre very little. This is because the juxtapositional nature
of collage brought the strict codification of genres into question from its
very outset; shifts and transformations of form, on the other hand, are more
deeply intertwined in the very nature of collage.
5 My use of the term “political” indicates that the works in question concern
contested issues, and that the resolution of those issues has real-world con-
sequences. I borrow this combined definition of the “political” from Michael
Warner, as he develops the idea across the essays in Publics and ­Counterpublics,
and Jerome McGann, in “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes.”
6 Tamara Trodd gets at the “shock” that collage was capable of inducing
when she describes how when photographs of Picasso’s 1913 collages “Still
Life with ‘Guitar’ and Bottle” and “Violin” were published in Apollinaire’s
­journal Les Soirees de Paris in November 1913, these photographs
caused a number of the magazine’s readers to cancel their subscriptions,
threatening the journal with financial collapse. The constructions, with
their rubbishy, ephemeral materials, seemed to the majority of the mag-
azine’s patrons shocking, risky, and provisional. Only by the Surrealists
were these collage-constructions and their materials seen as poetic, and
celebrated as such….
(75)
7 Stephen Fredman finds a similar structure in what he terms “contextual
practice,” where he argues that
contextual practice works by uncovering new energies and images
through juxtaposing found materials or by directing aesthetic attention
to an existing but previously ignored context. With its juxtapositional
bent, contextual practice applies the most far-reaching formal innova-
tion in the arts of the twentieth century—the principle of collage—in
striking and unforeseen ways to the conduct of life.
(Contextual Practice 3)
Fredman defines collage as a combination of two actions: “the selection
of objects from the real world for incorporation into an artwork, and the
juxtaposition of objects in unexpected—that is, nonlinear, irrational, or
­antihierarchical—ways” (Contextual Practice 5).
8 Although its treatment as an art-historical form is common, a large number
of these studies are found in catalogs from museum exhibitions.
9 Related examples include Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes (1994) and Susan
Rubin Suleiman’s Subversive Intent (1990).
10 The most thorough literary critical discussion of Flarf to date is by Brian
Reed, in Nobody’s Business, 88–121. Reed argues that Flarf poetry
 Introduction  19
is calculated to irk, irritate, and ideally provoke its intended (highly ed-
ucated, moderate to far-left) audience into an impassioned response….
[Flarf] targets, and mocks… the “exhorting classes,” the intellectuals
who feel obligated to educate and motivate the populace at large. It as-
pires to jolt disheartened poets, critics, and artists out of their passivity
and inspire them to resume their pedagogical mission….
(90)
Other critical discussions of Flarf include Dan Hoy’s “The Virtual
­Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf” and Jasper
Bernes’s “Art, Work, Endlessness: Flarf and Conceptual Poetry Among
the Trolls.” Hoy’s article has an exhaustive discussion of the implications
of what he argues is the Flarfists’ uncritical use of Google as a language-­
generating procedure in their work.
11 Although Shelley’s sense of the importance of the poet in society had already
shifted by the time George Oppen revised this claim, in his poem ­“Disasters”
(1975), to that of “legislators of the unacknowledged world…” (267).
12 By “real” writers, I mean those who are either professional writers or who
are otherwise acknowledged as having their main identity subsumed by the
idea of being a writer.
13 Frankly, the “419 eater” project seems nearly identical to Goldsmith’s Day,
with the added benefit of having a Tom Sawyer-esque level of humor and
cosmic justice.
14 Lautréamont wrote: “Poetry should be made by all. Not by one” (75). Bur-
roughs, who quoted this sentiment in multiple different locations, cited it
from Tzara.
15 In 2006, Magee experienced a version of this type of shocked outrage in
response to a reading of his poem, “Their Guys, Their Asian Glittering
Guys, Are Gay,” subsequently posted on the Internet. C.f., Reed, Nobody’s
­Business 116–20.
16 Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014
in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was unarmed at the time. The ­shooting took
place after Wilson attempted to apprehend Brown as a s­ uspect in a reported
convenience store theft of several packets of cigarettes. ­Protests and civil
unrest erupted in Ferguson in the wake of the shooting, in part due to the
disputed circumstances of the events leading up to it. Brown’s death led to a
nationwide debate concerning the relationship between A ­ frican ­A mericans
and law enforcement. However, in the time since Brown’s shooting, there
have been multiple other cases of unarmed black men and women shot
by police officers or dying in police custody, including the deaths of Eric
­Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Philando
Castile, and Walter Scott. When Perelman refers to the “ongoing crisis” with
respect to Goldsmith’s reading, this is in part what he means—that Brown’s
death was not an isolated incident but rather perceived as a signal event in
an overall crisis of police brutality toward African Americans.
17 While Perelman offers a qualified defense of Goldsmith’s actions (more like
an analysis of them, and also of the response), Daniel Morris states:
I contend his decision to cast the autopsy report as a poem is a reframing
of the document with progressive social implications. In my reading of
a transcript of “The Body of Michael Brown,” Goldsmith’s conceptual
action called my attention to its narrative, tropological, and linguistic
features in ways that encouraged my reception of it as a textual space
liberated from its mooring as an ideological state apparatus.
(106)
20 Introduction
Morris bases his analysis of “The Body of Michael Brown” on a transcript
of the poem he received from the author. The video of the reading has been
removed from circulation at Goldsmith’s request.
18 Goldsmith has described how he did not include other notable assassinations
from the 1960s—such as those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X—
due to the lack of extant live journalistic coverage of them.
19 My discussion here about the “tone and temper” of news coverage, as well
as the potential theories of governmental involvement, only applies to main-
stream media coverage. As it is well known, there have been theories, more
or less substantiated, about governmental involvement in the Kennedy assas-
sinations and 9/11.
0 Morris cites the website PoliceOne and its editor Doug Wylie’s extensive
2
commentary regarding aspects of the autopsy report and Wylie’s explicitly
expressed desire to see Wilson’s narrative about the events leading up to the
shooting validated (109–111).
1 Collage Form and
Collage Theory

The simplest, most accessible way to characterize collage is as ­follows: it

combines images, whether visual, graphemic, or both, with an ­interruption
in continuity, a “cut” of some sort.1 That is to say, it is a form of juxta-
position. The famous last lines of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ­exemplify
many of these formal aspects of collage; however, at first glance, a reader
unfamiliar with this poem and its sources might not recognize that it
has any formal relation to collage.2 Unlike many of the other texts that
I will examine, it does not look like it has been cut up, rearranged, or
stitched together. The juxtapositional quality of this text has everything
to do with context, syntax, and the expected relation between these two
aspects of written language. In this brief section, Eliot has imported text
and references from both historical and literary sources, including the pre-­
Arthurian myth of the Fisher King (the discursive lines of the Fisher King,
“fishing, with the arid plain behind [him],” who asks, “Shall I at least set
my lands in order?”), central to the entire poem; children’s nursery rhymes
(“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down”); and a series
of lines in multiple non-English languages, including Provençal (“Poi s’as-
cose nel foco che gli affina,” or “Then he hid himself in the fire that puri-
fies them”), Latin (“Quando fiam uti chelidon,” or “When shall I become
like the swallow?”), and French (“Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie,”
or “The prince of ­Aquitainia in the abandoned tower”). This material
is borrowed from ­Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, Dante’s
­Inferno, Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, the Brihadaranyaka-­Upanishad,
Gerard de N­ erval’s El Desdichado, Greco-Roman mythology, and popu-
lar culture.3 What is initially obvious to the eye is Eliot’s use of material
in three languages of the European tradition, as he maintains the literary
convention of setting these lines in italic type and so distinctly marks their
foreignness to the surrounding text.
The final two lines of this section, which end the poem, are not itali-
cized, though they are in Sanskrit, a language comparatively unfamiliar
to English-language readers as compared to French and Latin. (Provençal
is no longer a familiar language, but it was a common university offer-
ing in the early twentieth century and, to the untrained eye, looks very
much like Italian.) The poem’s penultimate line—“Datta. Dayadhvam.
22  Collage Form and Collage Theory
Damyata.”—refers to the three versions of the word “da” (the voice of
the thunder) heard by the offspring of Prajapati when they asked him to
tell them their duties. The humans heard “data,” or “give alms”; the gods
heard “damyata,” “be restrained”; the demons heard “dayadhvam,” or
“have compassion.” The final word of the poem, repeated thrice in one
unpunctuated, extended line, is “shantih,” which means “the peace which
passeth understanding,” according to Eliot’s own notes. ­“Shantih” is
­repeated, as Eliot does here, as a formal ending to the Upanishad. The end-
ing to the poem, a type of “amen” to a bankrupt and exhausted W ­ estern
civilization, derives from an Eastern religion; it is placed at the end of a
section alone in a line, as Eliot had in a previous section used onomato-
poeic nonsense syllables: “Weialala leia/ Wallala leialala” (ll. 277–8 and
290–1).4 These lines demonstrate three different types of juxtaposition,
here by a process of substitution: that of foreign language for English, that
of a meaning that is semantically expected for the meaning that accrues
through allusion, and that of repeated and extended sounds for those in a
standard sentence form.
These disjunctive lines of The Waste Land import outside texts and
references while maintaining a thematic consistency and coherence. This
is an important aspect of literary collage, which manifests as a shoring of
fragments against (my) ruins. The major theme of the text—­concerning
the decline of Western civilization and culture—evolves through var-
ied references to the Fisher King, the children’s song “London Bridge is
­Falling Down,” and the context of the quotations from foreign languages
(Dante’s Inferno; the Latin quotation from Pervigililum Veneris, which
refers to the myth of Procne and Philomela; and the French quotation
from Nerval, the context of which recalls both the initial reference to the
Fisher King and the “Ruined Tower” of the Tarot, a symbol of death and
decay). The poem maintains thematic consistency in the midst of syntac-
tical and contextual juxtaposition, and not despite it but because of it.
For instance, the half line “O swallow swallow” is inserted at the end of
line 430, after the quotation referring to Philomela, who was turned into
a swallow to save her from her own attempted suicide. 5 In this context,
“swallow” refers both to the bird (noun) that she was transformed into
and to the act of swallowing (verb), which plays a major component in
this story, as she has cooked her own child and served him as a meal to
his father, Tereus. The next line, “These fragments I have shored against
my ruins,” perhaps the most famous line in the poem, is a description of
the formal and thematic methodology of the poem. “Ruins” is the short-
hand version of Eliot’s vision of modern civilization, for which London
stands in as a representative city. The “fragments” in question are both
the individual segments of his poem that he has imported into this new
context and the poem as a whole, a collection of juxtaposed fragments
that produces a coherent context. In this manner, the collage form be-
comes, for Eliot, the modern form par excellence but, unlike many of
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  23
the figures considered in this project, not because it has revolutionary or
enlightening potential. Rather, for Eliot, only through fragments can the
utter decay of modern life be properly represented, and only through the
rescue of certain fragments from the past can any of the remnants of a
once-great Western culture be salvaged.6
Though Eliot’s intention in his innovative poetic form may have been
one that was largely nostalgic and conservative, later writers have built
on his innovations, taking them in many and differing directions. Jahan
Ramazani describes how “so-called Third World poets” have used what
he terms “modernist bricolage”

in their quest to break through monologic lyricism, to express their

cross-cultural experience, despite vast differences in ethnicity, ge-
ography, politics, and history from the Euromodernists. Modernist
bricolage—the synthetic use in early twentieth-century poetry of
diverse cultural materials ready to hand—has helped postcolonial
poets encode aesthetically the intersections among multiple cultural
vectors.
(448)

Ramazani’s insight is that the spread of not only language and “mono-
logic lyricism” but also the capacity for juxtaposition is one that works
both ways. The British Empire’s exportation of its language and culture
far from the British Isles provoked extraordinary acts of juxtaposition;
a collage poetics that emanates from such a situation is perhaps unsur-
prising. Even Eliot, in his massively influential essay, “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,” saw that

what happens when a new work of art is created is something that

happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,
which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new)
work of art among them…. [T]he whole existing order must be, if
ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of
each work of art toward the whole are readjusted….
(38)

While he may have been largely thinking of his own position with re-
spect to the literary canon in English, it was the work he was (in 1919)
preparing to write that would change the existing order of poetry for the
twentieth century and beyond, and one that would, through its formal
example, invite writers from many countries to participate in an increas-
ingly global culture of juxtaposition.
The example of The Waste Land, despite its epochal importance in
twentieth-century literary history, does not encompass all that there is
24  Collage Form and Collage Theory
to say about the formal aspect of collage. Indeed, that poem lacks one of
the fundamental formal qualities of collage: visual evidence of a mate-
rial cut and suture. Whether in a film, an artwork, or a text, such visual
juxtaposition is often in play in a special way in collage and so deserves
particular emphasis. These pages from “Thorow” in Susan Howe’s Sin-
gularities encapsulate nicely the importance of visuality to literary col-
lage (Figure 1.1). What is at issue in this text is not just a matter of the
impossibility of quoting from such a work, though that certainly is an
aspect of it, and an ironic one too, given the importance of citation to
many collage texts. When words gain as much significance as visual
markers as signifiers of content, the word itself serves as a type of image
on the page as well as a semantic shortcut for the image that has been
created in language. The image thus works doubly here, containing both
the instantaneous image of the visual and the accretive image of the
graphemic. Likewise, the possibilities for the creation of knowledge in,
by, and through these works are multiplied through the plural sites of
image making.
This particular example from Singularities is also relevant when con-
sidering collage’s “cut-and-paste” aesthetic. Howe’s poem appears to
have been made using technology that would have been current fifty
years prior to its composition. To mark its particular formal practice,
a collaged image often necessitates the showing of seams: that is to say,
though seamlessly edited digital images are technologically possible, and
have been for some time, many of those who continue to practice collage
artistically have maintained its original “cut-and-paste” aesthetic—in

Figure 1.1  E
 xcerpts from Singularities © 1990 by Susan Howe. ­Published by
Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  25
appearance if not in reality. The choice to sustain an obsolete artistic
practice despite commercial innovations that have superseded it is not a
trivial one. Collage has become an artistic practice that contains within
its form a message that is as much against technological progress as
against clarity or transparency in meaning, one that mirrors the skepti-
cal view of technologically mandated progress in the service of natural-
ism or mimesis, as maintained by some of its original theorists.
Whether accomplished by scissors or scanner, collage disrupts the
traditional illusion of a whole, coherent, organic art. Here, “reality”
intrudes, and is intruded upon. (This movement goes both ways, not
merely of the “everyday” into art, but of the formal qualities of art into
the “everyday.”) While gazing at an artwork, viewing a film, or reading
a poem, one is again made aware of both an everyday existence and the
existence of the collage itself in space and time.7 I have already claimed
that collage has often been used as a form for those artists interested in
creating a politically motivated art form. Collage was largely developed
by artists who, far from being apolitical, were deeply devoted to revo-
lutionary change in society: on the left, Dadaists, and later, S­ urrealists;
on the right, Italy’s Futurists. These efforts to reimagine what society
might look like and then to instantiate these changes through art give
an answer to the question of what collage can accomplish as an artis-
tic medium. The confluence of, on the one hand, an art form predi-
cated on disruption and juxtaposition, and, on the other hand, forms of
politically motivated aesthetic practices, produces a seeming paradox,
though: why would anyone who desires to instruct or persuade choose
a form that implies or enacts relations rather than stating them? This
choice suppresses both the conventional understanding of authority and
the analytical commentary in discourse and rhetoric. Many artists rec-
ognized this utopian impulse behind collage, whereby meaning inheres
in materials rather than in logic or personality. Others found the type
of pedagogy exerted by collage to be more ideologically sound, whereby
subjects seem to find illumination for themselves rather than having it
foisted upon them. These artists all work with the conviction that they
have some knowledge to impart, or a particular view to share with their
audience. Rather than producing rhetorical prose in an attempt to get
these views across (though many did that as well), they used collage as
the medium for their message.
However, I do not believe that there is anything inherently revolution-
ary about collage as a formal strategy—the examples of collage forms
that can be seen throughout advertising and the mass media make that
point clearly enough.8 Rather collage’s force, and its consistent attraction
for those desiring to use art as a form of political critique, comes from
the ability to persuade, and to persuade while allowing the subject being
persuaded to feel as if she were coming to an original and “­ natural” con-
clusion on her own. This facility makes collage a remarkably powerful
26  Collage Form and Collage Theory
formal strategy, but does not ensure that it works for “progressive” or
“democratic” ends. The flexibility of collage as a practice means that,
though it is powerful as a tool for expressing a political message, no
particular politics is associated with it. Politically, collage is a means
with no inherent ends, and while it may contain revolutionary potential,
it can also be domesticated toward conservative ends.

Collage Theory
In collage, the whole must exceed the sum of its parts, and power derives
in part from the degree of juxtaposition and disruption within a given
work. This juxtaposition can be used to guide perception and shape
knowledge, or something that feels like knowledge, such as prejudice
or ideological certitude. A multiplicity of images are grouped together,
and by their proximity illuminate a subject, incite a feeling, or teach a
lesson in a way that no single aspect—or even each component aspect,
taken singly—could. I have claimed that collage is anti-narrative, and
what I mean by this claim is that the fundamentally disruptive power
of collage’s juxtapositions can be, in its most powerful examples, used
to interrupt overarching, dominant narratives (“master narratives”) to
open up a space for something else to be said. In some cases, this “some-
thing else” is a different story, told from a new point of view. In others,
it is something entirely new, a new form of discourse or of images not
limited by narrativity. The two primary theoretical axes that best aid in
the understanding of how collage—particularly literary collage—works
and what it can do, the ideogram and the dialectical image, depend on
the artist purposefully combining images in a way that creates knowl-
edge, understanding, or illumination. These theories, advanced in the
early twentieth century by Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, respec-
tively, equally construe collage as a pathway to revolutionary insight
concerning the image, language, and cognition.

The Ideogram (With a Brief Discussion of Montage)

Pound’s concept of the “ideogrammic method,” which shaped and sus-
tained his Cantos, was inspired by his editorial work on the late ­Ernest
Fenollosa’s lecture notes on Chinese poetry. Pound promulgated his
­
revised version of these notes under Fenollosa’s name as “The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” which was printed in four
installments in The Little Review, beginning with the fall 1919 issue.9
Fenollosa, not a Sinologist, was a Harvard-trained scholar of Japanese
literature and American transcendental philosophy; he made a n ­ umber of
much-discussed errors not only in translations but also in the ­analytical
aspects of his lectures and essay. Some say these were ­fortuitous or
­fruitful ones, others disagree; they are in either case errors.10 Jean-Michel
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  27
Rabaté has described the relation of Fenollosa’s theories to the “actual”
Chinese language as such:

As linguists have confirmed, Fenollosa’s theory relies on a crude

simplification of the writing system of the Chinese language, for
­Fenollosa suggests that all ideograms are pictograms, which is in fact
true for only a minority of them, most ideograms being composed of
a phonetic element linked to a radical whose etymology is not system-
atically visual. What is important is thus less the theory’s “positive”
veracity than the starting point it provides for the new poetic work.
(“Forgetting” 134)

The significance of Pound’s theory of the ideogram, as derived from

Fenollosa, has little to do with the Chinese language as it was or is writ-
ten or spoken; as Rabaté again describes it, the achievement of these
ideas, which “launched a new poetics that would eliminate distinctions
between poetry and prose, between music and verb, between personal
lyricism and historical document,” is one that was achieved through a
conception of Chinese language and culture “that is partly imaginary”
(“Globalization” 125). The significance of Pound’s theory inheres not in
its factual relation to the Chinese language with respect to its sources
but, rather, in its influence on twentieth-century American poetics.
Though Pound’s theories are based on his work on the Fenollosa manu-
scripts, they were evolving before the manuscripts came into his possession.
In many ways, the ideogrammic method extends the poetics that Pound had
practiced first with imagism, with the “luminous detail,” and that is incor-
porated into his later theory of paideuma.11 But through his interpretation
of Fenollosa’s admittedly loose interpretation of Chinese language and lit-
erature, Pound established a tradition and a name for his collage poetics.12
The theory of the ideogram is itself a kind of collage or, perhaps,
a conceptual assemblage. Essentially a theory of the image, it is based
on the concept that the ideogram relates two or more concrete images
without conventional syntactic connectives, thus suggesting a suprama-
terial relationship. Essentially opposed to metaphor, conjunctions, and
the copula (“is”), the ideogram emphasizes the inseparability of nouns
and verbs in nature—no action (verb) exists without an actor (noun),
and vice versa. Thus, “The Chinese Written Character,” or the “big
­essay on verbs” as Pound referred to it, critiques the standard Western
forms of thought and language that work in a mode of classification
and ­isolation.13 ­According to Daniel Katz, “[f]or Pound and Fenollosa,
the key flaw of western languages is… their faulty establishment of the
abstraction of the ‘thing’ in the first place, whereas in ‘nature’ there is
nothing but process, and transfer of energy” (77). This argument devel-
ops through an extended figure of a pyramid: at its base are the most
concrete expressions of the qualities of a thing (e.g. a cherry tree); this
28  Collage Form and Collage Theory
pyramid progresses by proliferating increasingly abstract descriptors
(red, rust, flamingo) until it reaches its apex, which is inevitably the word
being. This weak method of knowing and understanding, Fenollosa/
Pound argues, “cannot think half of what it wants to think. It has no
way of bringing together any two concepts that do not happen to stand
one under the other and in the same pyramid” (57). Furthermore, change
and growth, as well as interaction and “multiplicity of functions,” are in
this model impossible to realize.
Pound’s published version of Fenollosa’s notes develops the idea that
the “natural” state of an idealized language—and therefore of ­thinking—
is more attuned to “science” than to “logic.” “Science,” Pound claims,
“fought till she got at the things” (57). Pound continues this opposition
to explain how poetry becomes aligned with science:

In diction and in grammatical form science is utterly opposed to logic.

Primitive men who created language agreed with science and not with
logic. Logic has abused the language which they left to her mercy.
Poetry agrees with science and not with logic.
The moment we use the copula, the moment we express subjective
inclusions, poetry evaporates. The more concretely and vividly we
express the interactions of things the better the poetry.
(57)

This passage both demonstrates and explicates the essence of the ideo-
grammic method. It demonstrates it because the style here is paratactic,
presenting concepts through concrete examples, juxtaposed against one
another. For a theoretical essay, there is surprisingly little discursive ex-
planation.14 It explicates it because the juxtaposed examples indicate
several major complaints against traditional poetic language (as well
as standard written English): the use of the copula as opposed to con-
crete, specific, transitive verbs; the emphasis on nouns over verbs; the
movement toward abstraction in language; the use of grammatical forms
not rooted in nature. Science represents the concrete over the abstract,
verbs over nouns, juxtaposition over connectives. Ideally, the ideogram-
mic method mimics what Pound saw as the world’s natural processes
and illustrates a more accurate representation of humanity’s place in the
world, one that is relational rather than hierarchical. Traditional meth-
ods of representation (including, essentially, all European languages and
the development of poetry in these languages as well as discursive forms
of logical argumentation), Pound believed, perpetuate a hierarchical re-
lationship between humans and their environment. By rejecting the tra-
ditional pyramid of “being,” Pound implicitly critiques not only poetic
language but also the bases of most political, philosophical, and reli-
gious thought as well. All structures that rely on hierarchical relation-
ships, whether religious, legal, economic, or familial, require a language
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  29
that cooperates with this kind of thinking—the exception perhaps is the
type of power enforced by divine or mythic violence.
The ideogrammic method, by contrast, strives to produce knowledge
of the way that the natural world works and to do so in the way that
the natural world works—through the juxtaposition of particulars. This
version of the ideogram is an idealization, and one that is thoroughly
nostalgic, though nostalgic for a reality that likely never existed. The
“world” that Pound sees the ideogrammic method as evoking is one
that is dominated by a “nature” unimpeded (or barely so) by human
encroachment: “Farmer pounds rice,” for instance, not “U.S. wages war
in the Middle East.” Nature here is presumed to have a kind of inherent
rightness to it, and it is one that humans could be in harmony with if
they will only learn to think, speak, and write well. Pound assumes that
the characteristics that he values in the natural world—the preference
for verbs over nouns, and thus for action over stasis, for instance—are
dormant in modern man and that they exist if only we can learn to let
them out as they once were. This presumption is why I call this theory
nostalgic, in that it longs for a better world, one that the theorist pre-
sumes is now past. This nostalgic facet of the ideogrammic method co-
habitates with its revolutionary one; it resides not just in the applications
for formal artistic achievement (which at this point are well established)
but also in Pound’s ability, through his thinking on the ideogrammic
method, to reimagine the world, creating one that is simultaneously lost
and new. What he presumes is past—and thus is some aspect of the
“truth” that has only been forgotten or buried—I would argue, rather
has never been. In this aspect of his thinking about the ideogrammic
method, the utopianism of collage can be clearly seen.
Though the formal aspects of collage provided a strong break with the
poetic past, in many other ways, the ideogrammic method ­extends the
poetic method Pound had practiced first as an imagist, the ­“luminous
­detail.” In 1911, he wrote an essay entitled, “I Gather the Limbs of
Osiris” that was published in twelve installments between N ­ ovember
1911 and February 1912 in the pages of A. R. Orage’s New Age.
­Originally entitled, “A New Method of Scholarship,” Pound here sets
out his understanding of what scholarship and poetry can do:

Any fact is, in a sense, significant. Any fact may be “symptomatic,”

but certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent condi-
tions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law.
… A few dozen facts of this nature give us intelligence of a
­period—a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array
of facts of the other sort. These facts are hard to find. They are swift
and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard
governs an electric circuit.
(22–3)
30  Collage Form and Collage Theory
The “luminous detail,” or “patterned integrity,” is something—whether
historical, musical, or poetic—that retains its ability to teach and
­enlighten even when removed from its original context. Hugh Kenner
claims that the artist can embody a luminous detail:

The artist himself, however, a patterned integrity, manifests in him-

self his own spectrum of forces, called his virtù… the unique en-
ergetic signature of all he does, the knot he alone ties, the radiant
node “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are
constantly rushing”….
(156)15

This gloss on the luminous detail emphasizes the force of the creativ-
ity and intelligence of the artist/scholar as he selects from all possible
facts/energies in the world in order to bring to light exactly those that
will cause the greatest illumination. This is not an accidental or chance
occurrence, not a random lumping together of heterogeneous material.
This heightened and flexible power to teach that inheres in the
­“luminous detail” is at the base of the persuasiveness of the collaged
image, and its persistent use for both pedagogical and propagandistic
purposes. In his prose writings on the subject, Pound himself explained
more explicitly how the collaged image can be used to teach, to “reveal
the subject.” For example, in the section of Guide to Kulchur (1937)—
perhaps Pound’s most consistently ideogrammic text—entitled “Zweck,
or the Aim,” Pound states that the purpose of his writing was to achieve
illumination through juxtaposition:

At last a reviewer in a popular paper (or at least one with immense

circulation) has had the decency to admit that I occasionally cause
the reader “suddenly to see” or that I snap out a remark… “that
reveals the whole subject from a new angle.”
That being the point of the writing. That being the reason for pre-
senting first one facet and then another—I mean to say the purpose
of the writing is to reveal the subject. The ideogrammic method
consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point
one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind,
onto a part that will register.
The “new” angle being new to the reader who cannot always be
the same reader. The newness of the angle being relative and the
writer’s aim, at least this writer’s aim being revelation, a just revela-
tion irrespective of newness or oldness.
(51; emphasis mine)

Throughout Guide to Kulchur, Pound not only explains his vision of the
ideogram, he also enacts it, repeatedly. Each paragraph presents a new
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  31
“facet” of the (not so) implicit argument—that “process,” not fact, is
essential to deep understanding, and that process is best presented in an
ideogrammic way. Presumably, one of these facets will get through “the
dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will
register.” This is the “just revelation irrespective of newness or oldness”
that the poet seeks. For Pound, “the point of all writing is a poetics
of revelation” (Park 30). He then continues this discussion, turning to
an explicit consideration of how the ideogrammic method, in rhetorical
prose, may be pedagogical:

Knowledge is or may be necessary to understanding, but it weighs as

nothing against understanding, and there is not the least use or need
of retaining it in the form of dead catalogues once you understand
process.
Yet, once the process is understood it is quite likely that the knowl-
edge will stay by a man, weightless, held without effort.
(53)

The ideogram in rhetorical prose works differently than it does in poetry.

Several times in Guide to Kulchur, Pound assures his readers that, yes,
they are experiencing an ideogram: “These disjunct paragraphs belong
together, Gaudier, Great Bass, Leibnitz, Erigena, are parts of one ideo-
gram, they are not merely separate subjects” (75). This is from a poet
who so trusts his readers’ awareness of the processes of world culture,
history, religion, politics, and economics that an 800-page guide is now
necessary to read his major work.16 His concern for the “just revelation”
here indicates the subject’s urgency and importance.
Though much can be learned from Pound’s prose, I will now turn to the
Cantos to see how Pound’s collage method works in poetry. “Canto IV,”
which was the first canto to assume its final shape, is a fitting place to start
as it contains several different ideograms within it, and also comprises a
single large one.17 Specifically, I will identify and analyze three modes of
Poundian ideogrammic construction, the “great bass,” the “palimpsest,”
and “ply over ply.” The first lines of “Canto IV” give a strong example of
juxtapositional literary collage:

Palace in smoky light,

Troy but a heap of smoldering boundary stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!
(4:13)

This succession of images is likely to leave underprepared readers with

little hope that they can make their way through the poem unaided.
Richard Sieburth has described Pound’s methodology in these cantos
32  Collage Form and Collage Theory
as an “ideogrammic poetics of parataxis” which aims at “pulverizing
the syntagms of narrative, at erasing transitions, at opening up intervals
and gaps via a constructivist technique of collage…” (22). With the aid
of available guides, we can gather a few facts about these lines. For in-
stance, the opening two lines, referring to the “palace in smoky light, /
Troy but a heap of smoldering boundary stones,” are from the opening
scene of Euripedes’s The Trojan Women; ANAXIFORMINGES is from
the Greek, “Anaxiphormigges hymnoi,” “Hymns that are lords of the
lyre,” the beginning of Pindar’s “Olympian Ode II.” Unlike later sec-
tions of this canto, however, the connecting links among these ideas
and quotations are not obvious, and that is the point. They are related
in what Pound referred to as “the great bass.” Again, from Guide to
Kulchur:

Certain sounds we accept as “pitch,” we say that a certain note is

do, re, mi, or B flat in the treble scale, meaning that it has a certain
frequency of vibration.
Down below the lowest note synthesized by the ear and “heard”
there are slower vibrations. The ratio between these frequencies and
those written to be executed by instruments is OBVIOUS in math-
ematics. The whole question of tempo, and of a main base in all
musical structure resides in use of these frequencies.
(73)

The poet here relies upon those deeper resonances, and a reader’s ability
to detect them; without these resonances, the opening lines will make
little sense.18 As we saw in the “Chinese Written Character” essay, it is
through the “suggestion, not the explicit assertion, of fundamental re-
lations existing between two or more elements within a canto or across
a number of cantos” that constitutes the collage praxis of The ­C antos.
This is how “[t]he canto becomes a field of fundamental relations, with
one phrase, image, or line potentially resonating or ‘rhyming’ with
­others…” (Hair 57). This type of ideogram participates in a voyage to
discover the deep processes that shape human nature and guide human
history, through the resources of myth, history, literature, and religion.
The next major section of the poem layers historical and mythic mate-
rial to form a “subject rhyme” on rather gruesome tales of human hearts
being eaten.19

And by the curved, carved foot of the couch,

  claw-foot and lion head, an old man seated
Speaking in the low drone…:
  Ityn!
Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!
And she went toward the window and cast her down,
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  33
  “All the while, the while, swallows crying:
Ityn!
  “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”
  “It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?”
  “No other taste shall change this.”
And she went toward the window,
  the slim white bar
Making a double arch;
Firm even fingers held to the firm pale stone;
Swung for a moment,
  and the wind out of Rhodez
Caught in the full of her sleeve.
  … the swallows crying:
‘Tis. ‘Tis. Ytis!
(4:13–14)

The poet here—who is, in reality, two poets—vertically layers the Greek
myth of Tereus, Philomela, and Procne with the legendary story of the
death of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestan. 20 Tereus, King of Thrace,
rapes Philomela, his wife Procne’s sister. He then cuts out her tongue to
ensure her silence, but Philomela communicates the events to Procne by
weaving the story into a tapestry. In an act of revenge, Procne kills their
son, Ityn, and feeds his heart to Tereus, who upon learning of the deed,
attempts to kill the women. They are rescued by being transformed into
a swallow and a nightingale. The second story is from a legend attached
to the name of Cabestan, who fell in love with Soremonda. Her husband
discovered their love, killed Cabestan, and fed his heart to Soremonda,
who leapt to her death when he revealed the truth.
Pound’s combination of these two stories exceeds their superficial
similarities, which, given the nature of the events, are not difficult to
comprehend. As Soremonda leaps to her death, the poet lays the story
of Philomela and Procne over her suicide, so that she, too, floating to
her death, appears to fly. With no god to intervene, the poet has stepped
in to redeem Soremonda’s fate through metamorphosis—the kind of
metamorphosis that Pound will repeat over and over in the course of
the Cantos in the process of transforming the stuff of myth, history,
economics, and biography into poetry. 21 The ideogrammic method used
here extends beyond conventional juxtaposition in producing a type of
palimpsest. Pound has not set the stories of these two events next to each
other, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions. Rather, he has
layered one on top of the other, forcing two discrete moments in history
to become coterminous, and allowing parts of each to show through the
other. At the same time, this palimpsestic layering resists fusion—the
two events do not become one but rather intermingle, commenting upon
each other across space, time, cultures, and languages. 22 One example
34  Collage Form and Collage Theory
of how this happens is Pound’s use of multilingual puns. For instance,
at 4:13, we see the line: “Et ter flebiliter, Ityn, Ityn!” The first part of
the line, Latin for “and thrice with tears,” also sounds a great deal like
the English word “eat.” Ityn (or Itys) again sounds like “eaten.” Here, a
coincidental sonic similarity across languages is purposefully exploited
by the poet in the name of (black) humor.
The following section returns to the themes of misdirected passion
or desire and its consequences in reference to the story of Actaeon, who
was transformed into a stag by the goddess Diana when he caught sight
of her bathing:

Actaeon…
and a valley,
The valley is thick with leaves, with leaves, the trees,
The sunlight glitters, glitters a-top,
Like a fish-scale roof,
Like the church roof in Poictiers
If it were gold.
Beneath it, beneath it
Not a ray, not a sliver, not a spare disc of sunlight
Flaking the black, soft water;
Bathing the body of nymphs, of nymphs, and Diana,
Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air,
Shaking, air alight with the goddess,
fanning their hair in the dark,
Lifting, lifting and waffing:
Ivory dipping in silver,
Shadow’d, o’ershadow’d
Ivory dipping in silver,
Not a sploch, not a lost shatter of sunlight.
Then Actaeon: Vidal,
Vidal. It is old Vidal speaking,
stumbling along in the wood,
Not a patch, not a lost shimmer of sunlight,
the pale hair of the goddess.

(4:14)

Both Acteon and, later, Vidal are transformed and then attacked by their
own dogs, mistaken for the creatures they had formerly hunted. 23 This
section of “Canto IV” emphasizes one of the ways in which Pound’s
ideogrammic method differs in practice from what Fenollosa had set out
in the “Chinese Written Character” essay. While Fenollosa emphasized
the transitive verb and its singular importance in the English language
(as R. John Williams claims, “… for Fenollosa every word of written
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  35
Chinese ends up being a verb of some sort…” (103)), Pound here has
written a poem in which large sections have no verbs at all; in the pas-
sage discussed earlier, there are three instances of forms of “is,” while
the only other verb used is “glitters.” Pound accomplishes this through
the use of gerunds and other verbal nouns that take on the functions,
and the energy, of the absent verbs. The common perception that the
Cantos are impenetrable is due, according to Ronald Bush, to Pound’s
determination to strip away any words not necessary for the poetic sense
of the poem:

The main principle was: never use a word to make the poem easier
to read; add words only to particularize sense. The Lustra Cantos
and Canto IV tend more and more toward appositive constructions
because Pound was becoming convinced that connectives were su-
perfluous forms of indicating mental relationship. The verbs “to be”
and “to have” were considered connectives.
(211)

Extraordinary not only for its evocative subject matter—not all cantos
were so lucky—but also for Pound’s use of alliteration, assonance, con-
sonance, and full repetition of whole words which pull the rhythm of the
poem along, this canto avoids alienation through extreme juxtaposition,
despite the willful lack of verbs.
This section makes use of an imbricated form of ideogram: the two
stories here—one of Acteon and one of Vidal (like the one of Cabestan,
this is a story taken from Provencal legend)—are partially layered on the
edges, as if they were the tiles of a roof. The leitmotif of imbrication,
“ply over ply,” which features later in this canto (“Ply over ply, thin
glitter of water” and “Ply over ply / The shallow eddying fluid / beneath the
knees of the gods”) seems apposite here. The phrase derives from a com-
bination of a reference from Robert Browning Sordello and a mistaken
translation from Fenollosa’s notes from which Pound created the poem
“To-Em-Mei’s ‘The Unmoving Cloud,’” of Cathay (1916). Fenollosa
translated “eight surfaces” for what should have been “eight points of
the compass”; Pound in turn rendered the phrase as “the eight ply of the
heavens.”24 This phrase, “ply over ply,” recurs in both Pound’s poetry
and prose as an imbricated layering where aspects of one reference are
connected to another without superseding the previous one. It suggests
waves rushing in and out of the coast, or the layering of translucent
fabrics. It is a remarkably fit term for Poundian poetics in general, for
the poet worked ply over ply, never fully abandoning one conceptual
schema as he matured into a new one, allowing the patterns of the old
to shine through and reflect upon the newly discovered textures. Thus,
this ideogram evokes not only other ideograms, but also the image and
the luminous detail.
36  Collage Form and Collage Theory
It is rather remarkable—though perhaps not surprising—that two
of the most influential modernists (Pound and Sergei Eisenstein) both
found inspiration toward formal revolution in their art forms in the
(real or imagined) pictographic qualities of Chinese writing. In his arti-
cle, “Pound and the Poetry of Today,” Charles Bernstein has provoca-
tively compared the collage-based ideogrammic method of Pound with
­Eisenstein’s montage theory; I will use Bernstein’s argument as a means
of briefly discussing Eisensteinian montage, which shared an origin point
with Pound’s ideogrammic method, even while the works resulting from
these theories may be quite different. 25 Bernstein claims,

For Eisenstein, montage involves the use of contrasting images in the

service of one unifying theme; collage, as I use it here, juxtaposes
different elements without recourse to an overall unifying idea.
Pound wished to write a montage but produced something far more
interesting in the process.
(636)

Like Bernstein, I see an important distinction to be made between the

ideogrammic method and Eisensteinian montage, though I would not
frame this distinction so much as a matter of thematics as one that de-
pends on the text’s relation to narrative. Bernstein claims that Pound’s
“failure” to make The Cantos cohere (of course among his poem’s final
lines, Pound states “I cannot make it cohere”) produces a more “interest-
ing” text than if he had written a “coherent,” montage-based text in the
Eisensteinian tradition; to me, this failure is one that resonates with the
failure of meta-narratives (and thus certainly with the political disaster
in which Pound embroiled himself). Eisenstein, likewise, desired to tell
coherent stories in the service of a particular political party. Of course,
his version of montage gets hinged explicitly to narrative through, at
least in part, a newly intense pressure from the Soviet Communist Party,
increasingly authoritarian with respect to artistic form beginning in the
mid-1930s. 26
Prior to this shift in the Communist Party with respect to artistic form,
Eisenstein published an essay, “The Cinematographic Principle and the
Ideogram” (1929), which was, like Pound and Fenollosa’s “The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” inspired by what the author
saw as the possibilities for producing an experimental art form inspired
by the pictographic qualities of the Chinese written character:

The point is that the copulation (perhaps we had better say, the
combination) of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is to be re-
garded not as their sum, but as their product, i.e., as a value of
another dimension, another degree; each, separately, corresponds to
an object, to a fact, but their combination corresponds to a concept.
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  37
From separate hieroglyphs has been fused—the ideogram. By the
combination of two “depictables” is achieved the representation of
something that is graphically undepictable…. But this is—montage!
Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema, combining shots that
are depictive, single in meaning, neutral in content—into intellec-
tual contexts and series.
This is a means and method inevitable in any cinematographic ex-
position. And, in a condensed and purified form, the starting point
for the “intellectual cinema.”
For a cinema seeking a maximum laconism for the visual repre-
sentation of abstract concepts.
(87)

Like Pound (through Fenollosa), Eisenstein likely overestimated the

truly pictographic qualities of the Chinese written character. Yet, he,
too, read in the ideogram an analogous technique to that which he
would master for the cinema: cinematic editing as montage. Though
some film critics use the term “montage” to mean any form of editing,
what Eisenstein means by the term “montage” consists, as he clarifies
in this passage, in not merely the combination or linkage of shots but
rather, and explicitly, the collision of shots (individually seen as neutral
elements) whose juxtaposition was intended for the maximal effect on
the audience:

By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, its cell—

the shot?
By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each
other. By conflict. By collision.
(94)

In its most neutral form, all film editing is a type of montage, but, as
Eisenstein describes, not all editing takes advantage of the possibilities
of montage as he envisions it. Only montage that maximizes the juxta-
positional force—the collision and conflict, as he terms it—of cinema
will harness its force toward a revolutionary politics.
In another essay of the same year, “A Dialectical Approach to Film
Form,” Eisenstein clarifies how he views the power of montage editing
to combine individual montage cells (what he calls shots) in the most
forceful manner possible:

Step by step, by a process of comparing each new image with the

common denotation, power is accumulated behind a process that
can be formally identified with that of logical deduction. The de-
cision to release these ideas, as well as the method used, is already
intellectually conceived.
38  Collage Form and Collage Theory
The conventional descriptive form for film leads to the formal
possibility of a kind of filmic reasoning. While the conventional film
directs the emotions, this suggests an opportunity to encourage and
direct the whole thought process, as well.
… I would not attempt to deny that this form is most suitable for
the expression of ideologically pointed theses, but it is a pity that
the critics completely overlooked the purely filmic potentialities of
this approach.
[W]e have taken the first embryonic step towards a totally new
form of film expression. Towards a purely intellectual film, freed
from traditional limitations, achieving direct forms for ideas, sys-
tems, and concepts, without any need for transitions and para-
phrases. We may yet have a synthesis of art and science.
(122; emphasis in original)

Like Pound, Eisenstein views the power of montage to shape an intel-

lectual cinema as one that combines art and science. This synthesis was
to be achieved in an art form that had no need for “transitions and
paraphrases,” one that communicated its “ideas, systems, and concepts”
directly with its audience. Eisenstein’s view of the possibilities of mon-
tage editing in film is utopian and exoteric. He believed that the juxta-
positional force of editing through collision and conflict could transform
even neutral images into politically powerful ones.
Montage, in Eisenstein’s view, has the potential to revolutionize cin-
ema as a political, intellectual art form, one that can powerfully express
abstract, intellectual concepts in a few brief images. In other passages in
these essays, ­Eisenstein describes his conflict with other Soviet directors
over this particular issue, and the history of cinema attests to the way that
Eisenstein’s belief in the revolutionary potential of montage to ­produce
a truly political, intellectual cinema did not prevail over the commercial
potential inherent in his formal innovations. One of the most widely ad-
opted film studies textbooks contains a passage that characterizes the use
of montage in Hollywood cinema (via the ­“montage sequence”) as such:

[T]he montage sequence is part of Hollywood’s gradual ­reduction

of overt narrational presence…. The montage sequence thus
­transposes conventions of prose narration into cinema…. M ­ oreover,
the montage sequence aims at continuity, linking the shots through
non-diegetic music and smooth optical transitions (dissolves, wipes,
superimpositions, occasionally cuts). Yet the montage sequence still
makes narrative come forward to a great degree…. What keeps
the montage sequence under control is its strict codification: it is,
­simply, the sequence which advances the story action in just this
overt way.
(Bordwell et al. 29)
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  39
While it’s clearly true that the potential for this type of filmmaking
­exists in Eisenstein’s techniques (even his most famous example of mon-
tage, the “Odessa Steps” sequence from Battleship Potemkin, exhibits
some of these characteristics), it is also clear that Eisenstein’s vision of
montage goes far beyond that of making possible Hollywood’s ­“gradual
reduction of overt narrational presence.” As Annette Michelson has
claimed, by the time Eisenstein had completed October, “he had come
to see the dialectical cinema as affording the spectator, through an infer-
entially oriented system of montage, the possibility of critical analysis”
(“Eisenstein” 80). This critical analysis is precisely the opposite of what
the Hollywood montage sequence has to offer, that is, easy absorption
into the conventions of the art form (“non-diegetic music,” “smooth op-
tical transitions”), all in order to further a narrative that leaves little
room for critical analysis.

The Dialectical Image

To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of
thoughts. Where thought comes to a standstill in a constellation
saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears. It is
the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally
not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the ten-
sion between dialectical opposites is greatest. Hence, the object
constructed in the materialist presentation of history is itself the
dialectical image. The latter is identical with the historical object;
it justifies its violent expulsion from the continuum of historical
process.
(Benjamin Arcades 475)

Despite its evocative description, Benjamin’s own definition of the term

“dialectical image” is not immediately illuminating. Indeed, while many
critics and theorists have employed the term, its concrete definition
still seems elusive. The baseline definition is that the dialectical ­image
uses “archaic images to identify what is historically new about the ‘na-
ture’ of commodities. The principle of construction is that of montage,
whereby the image’s ideational elements remain ­u nreconciled, rather
than fusing into one ‘harmonizing perspective’” (Buck-Morss  67). 27
The dialectical image and the ideogram share a related form and both
intend to spark an illumination. However, the poetic ideogram aims
to recapture the “lost” unity of humans with the universe and its nat-
ural processes, whereas the dialectical image works to criticize such a
unity as an ideological facade. 28 The dialectical image, through juxta-
position, exposes the viewer’s world as one of f­ ragments; the passage
of time leads to further disintegration rather than progress. It “drives
identity, the lure of empathetic identification, out of the centre of any
40  Collage Form and Collage Theory
form—and with it the illusion that anything like a continuity might
pertain between thought and its ­object, part and whole, past and pres-
ent” (Dubrow 825). ­Precisely against “progress” as an ideological func-
tion, much of the ­energy ­B enjamin attributes to the dialectical image
works toward a process of decontextualization, whereby the illusion
of natural or “ ­ allegorical” coherence shatters and one of its elements
combines with other such e­ lements into what Benjamin termed a new
“constellation” that lays bare the “origins” of the constellated item,
whether from history, literature, or the arts. 29 In a constellation, “the
dialectical image effects a spatialization of time, crystallizing the fluid
relationship ­between the past and the present into a figural relation-
ship between ‘what was’ and ‘the now’” (­ McCormick 432; emphasis in
original). This decontextualization through juxtaposition elicits, even
requires, the sudden awakening of “profane illumination,” permitting
a viewer or reader to perceive relations in tension that had been hidden
prior to their opposition. 30 What Benjamin termed “montage” becomes
for him, “a device that can break the apparently rational linearity of
history through the shock generated by moments of interruption”
­(Trentin 1039). The dialectical image strips away the “mythological”
nature of the past and presents the historical object’s origins only when
constellated with other, related objects, chosen for their “nonsensuous
similarity,” a likeness not readily apparent to the naked eye. For, “only
in the dialectical image do we apprehend history and our true relation-
ship to the past” (Appler 104). As our relationship to nature, and thus
to language, has become increasingly alienated, we have lost sight of
the system of similarities that linked them. 31 The collage form, framing
the dialectical image, becomes necessary to refocus our vision.
The dialectical image provides glimpses of deep relations that offer the
possibility for revolutionary action as the subject becomes suddenly and
violently aware of the nature of his current situation. The “difficulty”
that often characterizes collage is, according to Michael Jennings, one
aspect of its potential to inspire revolutionary awakenings:

[t]he image into which the past and present moment flash as a con-
stellation, thereby coming to legibility, is an image formed from the
perception of the “nonsensuous similarity” that links one name with
another. Dialectical images are bursts of recognition which, in re-
vealing knowledge of a better world and a better time, may precip-
itate revolution.
(119)32

In speculation on how the constellation provides for revelation, ideas of

waking and sleeping receive special emphasis, as do moments of defa-
miliarization more generally: in such liminal states of consciousness, the
subject can approach alienation or ecstasy, which Benjamin described as
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  41
religious experiences and explored through his experiments with hash-
ish. In One Way Street, this state of being “lost” becomes literalized:

Lost and Found Office

Articles Lost.—What makes the very first glimpse of a village,
a town, in the landscape so incomparable and irretrievable is the
rigorous connection between foreground and distance. Habit has
not yet done its work. As soon as we begin to find our bearings, the
landscape vanishes at a stroke, like the façade of a house as we enter
it. It has not yet gained preponderance through a constant explora-
tion that has become habit. Once we begin to find our way about,
the earliest picture can never be restored.
Articles found.—The blue distance which never gives way to
foreground or dissolves at our approach, which is not revealed
spread-eagled and longwinded when reached but only looms more
compact and threatening, is the painted distance of a backdrop. It is
what gives stage sets their incomparable atmosphere.
(62–3)

Here, the subject is in a state of basic defamiliarization: he does not know

where he is because he cannot compare it to somewhere he has been before.
Only from such an unsustainable middle position, ­Benjamin proposes,
can one truly see one’s surroundings. Habit and repetition steal away our
tenuous relationship to our surroundings, and the original, unavoidable
strangeness cannot be recovered in the natural world. This idea informs his
theory of our relationship to language, and thus to history. We need to ex-
perience a sudden shock in order to see where we are in history, as well as
to understand our relationship to nature and language. The imposition of
a looming, impenetrable, painted backdrop prevents this defamiliarization
from taking place, keeping us at a distance, unable to approach, and thus
unable to see our setting for what it truly is, artifice rather than nature.33
The naturalist illusion denies the subject both the means and the impulse
to extract himself from this false relationship to nature, to language.34
Benjamin’s developing theories of art, nature, and revolution were
both inspired and frustrated by French Surrealism. He admired the
­movement’s aesthetic techniques as well as its theoretical justification,
in particular its “radical concept of freedom,” its near-perfect (for  a
­moment) combination of art and life, and its understanding of the power
and energies that reside in the outmoded, the recently gone-out-of-
style.35 In the following passage from his essay, “Surrealism: the Last
Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929), Benjamin analyzes the
potential of the Surrealist practice in terms of revolutionary potential:

To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution—this is the

project on which Surrealism focuses in all its books and enterprises.
42  Collage Form and Collage Theory
This it may call its most particular task. For them it is not enough
that, as we know, an intoxicating component lies in every revolu-
tionary act. This component is identical with the anarchic…. For
histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious takes us no further;
we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in
the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the
everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday….
… The socialist sees that “finer futures of our children and grand-
children” in a society in which all act “as if they were angels” and
everyone has as much “as if he were rich” and everyone lives “as if he
were free.” Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a trace—these are mere
images. And the stock imagery of these poets of the social-democratic
associations? Their gradus ad parnassum? Optimism….
… For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel
moral metaphor from politics and to discover in the space of politi-
cal action the one hundred percent image space.
(215–7)

In this section, Benjamin privileges those features of Surrealism best

calibrated to the dialectical image: an antimetaphorical stance, with
a preference for “pure” image; the intrusion of everyday life into art
and vice versa; the importance of a decontextualization through images
that brings about a sudden awakening; the didactic nature of art and
specifically poetry. Though the art and literature of Surrealism do not
consistently employ collage features as such—the works often contained
straight diegetic and representational content, despite their strange
images—its theorization of avant-garde practices bears relevance for
­Benjamin’s dialectical image. The final passage in his essay is remark-
ably inscrutable. He claims that the Surrealists, “exchange, to a man, the
play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each min-
ute rings for sixty seconds” (218). The alarm clock as representative of
revolutionary art: this image intensifies the leitmotif of “awakening” (it
is now a full-scale jolt awake) as the function of the dialectical image.36
This exchange (credited to Surrealism) is one in which art’s traditional
mimetic function (the human face) is given up for the constant, jarring
possibility of art as a pathway to revolution.
“Konvolut N” of The Arcades Project, “On the Theory of ­K nowledge,
Theory of Progress,” represents Benjamin’s major attempt to theorize
his project explicitly. He treats his own writing throughout The ­Arcades
Project no differently than those citations he includes from other
­authors; that is to say, quotations are not set off, either in discourse or
in the way that they are represented on the page, from the text he has
written, but rather each is juxtaposed with the next without differenti-
ation.37 The form of The Arcades Project, deeply invested in the juxta-
position of quotations, is directly related to Benjamin’s understanding
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  43
of the revolutionary potential of language, as it is “quotation, the dis-
sociation of a text from its context [that is] the key to the revelation of
relations that are internal to language, to the manifestation of a deeper
synthesis of meaning” (Friedlander 6). These quotations further develop
the connection articulated earlier between the state of awakening from
sleep and that of coming to political awareness; at the same time, yet an-
other connection is then made with the act of reading. One wakes from
a dream—here, the dream of the nineteenth century and of c­ ommodity
capitalism—through the process of reading. This process is literalized
twice through the citation of Marcel Proust’s opening scene of awak-
ening. Proust’s (literary) scene of awakening is taken as paradigmatic
for the act of an historian: Benjamin believes that true historical un-
derstanding can only begin when one “wakes up,” and so the historian
should instigate this process through the use of the dialectical image. In
this way, images from different historical eras can be juxtaposed into the
“now of recognizability”—this moment can be any, or every, moment
in which the subject wakes from his dream and sees things as they truly
are, as they put on their “surrealist” face. Benjamin treats all analysis
as literary analysis. Criticism, often seen as an activity reserved for the
effete or the apolitical, comes into the center stage of political and revo-
lutionary action. The “real” world can be analyzed like any other text;
the job of the critic (krinen) is to destroy the text so that it can no longer
be used to perpetuate myth. Thus, when the Surrealists trade in human
features for an alarm clock that constantly rings, they are momentarily
transformed into the paradigmatic Benjaminian artist/critic, abandon-
ing ­“mythological” art for that of the everyday.
In “Konvolut O [Prostitution, Gambling],” Benjamin contrasts two
extreme examples of capitalist alienation, one that involves money, the
other the human body:

What, on the baize cloth, looks out at the gambler from every
­number—luck, that is—here, from the bodies of all the women,
winks at him as the chimera of sexuality: as his type. This is noth-
ing other than the number, the cipher, in which just at that moment
luck will be called by name, in order to jump immediately to another
number. His type—that’s the number that pays off thirty-six fold,
the one on which, without even trying, the eye of the voluptuary
falls, as the ivory ball falls into the red or black compartment. He
leaves the Palais-Royal with bulging pockets, calls to a whore, and
once more celebrates in her arms the communion with number, in
which money and riches, absolved from every earthen weight, have
come to him from the fates like a joyous embrace returned to the full.
For in gambling and bordello, it is the same supremely sinful delight:
to challenge fate in pleasure…. The origin of true lechery is nothing
else but this stealing of pleasure from out of the course of life with
44  Collage Form and Collage Theory
God, whose covenant with such life resides in the name. The name
itself is a cry of naked lust. This sober thing, fateless in itself—the
name—knows no other adversary than the fate that takes its place in
whoring and that forges its arsenal in superstition. Thus in gambler
and prostitute that superstition which arranges the figures of fate
and fills all wanton behavior with fateful forwardness, fateful con-
cupiscence, bringing even pleasure to kneel before its throne [O1, 1].
(Arcades 489–90)

Whether the gambler’s chrematistic exchange is for money or sexual

pleasure, these exchanges derive from the same cause, the bourgeois
alienation from “earthen weight,” from an originary relationship to
God and to the universe. As Keith Johnson claims, “[B]oth [prostitu-
tion and gambling] are morally stigmatized, unwholesome expressions
of capitalism itself; their indiscretion is that they openly express its logic:
everything is for sale; money (magically) begets money” (124). Fate is a
whore because “she” has no loyalty. The prostitute, in turn, becomes
the ultimate example of the alienation of labor, as her commodity is her
own body, and when she calls out a name, the name is transformed into
a cipher, a zero. The name—one particularly specific type of language—
holds a sacred function in Benjamin’s thought: it contains the remnants
of humanity’s link to the divine. When a name can be transformed into
a number, even a cipher, the last shred of that divine function has been
stripped from language. The name could be any name, just as money
could be anyone’s money. The cipher may be filled momentarily with
the value that is imbued by the exchange of money for body. This value,
however, is as ephemeral as the gambler’s winnings.
This treatise on fate, money, the name, and sexuality is followed by
citations of two stories of gamblers of differing successes. Then, we are
presented with the contrast between forms of public and private im-
morality, figured in the bodies of women. The first is a citation of a
story from Carl Benedict Hase, who was approached by a prostitute who
handed him a piece of paper containing important information:

Thinking I had been given an address, I looked at the missive; and

what did I read?—An advertisement for a doctor who was claiming
to cure all imaginable ailments in the shortest possible time. It is
strange that the girls who are responsible for the malady should here
put in hand the means to recover from it.
(490)

Following this, the pronouncement:

‘As for the virtue of women, I have but one response to make to those
who would ask me about this: it strongly resembles the curtains
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  45
in theaters, for their petticoats rise each evening three times rather
than once.’ Comte Horace de Viel-Castel, Mémoires sur le règne de
Napoleon III (Paris, 1833), vol. 2, p. 188 [O1a, 1].
(491)

While the “private” women “raise their petticoats” secretly but with lit-
tle care for their partners, the “public” woman in the first citation goes
out of her way to help a man who, apparently, looks as if he needs it.
These passages are constellated around a reproduction of a watercolor
entitled La sortie du numéro 113, which shows a group of soldiers leav-
ing a gambling hall at the Palais-Royal, with the address of number 113,
who are greeted by a group of prostitutes. Presumably, the soldiers are
ready to spend their newly found wealth—or to mourn its loss in anoth-
er’s arms. These three elements—the two conflicting citations and the
image—work together in the manner of the dialectical image, to create
contrasts and cast doubts as to our reception of any of them. Presumably,
the women in the image are prostitutes—but from the description, they
could just as easily be the ladies who raise their petticoats. Although
Benjamin inserts authorial commentary before Hase’s story to the end
that, “The following account shows very conclusively how public immo-
rality (in contrast to private) carries in itself, in its liberating cynicism,
its own corrective,” this is not the only conclusion that one could reach
about this story: perhaps the woman was paid by the doctor to solicit
clients among her own clientele (490). Furthermore, despite Hase’s as-
sertion that it is the “girls” who cause the disease, perhaps he had some
visible symptoms that indicated that he was afflicted (and thus that he
was likely to be a customer already). This constellation of juxtaposed
image- texts awakens the reader/viewer to the possibilities underlying
commonly received notions about prostitutes. It awakens us from our
dream and causes (the beginning of) a new understanding on the subject.
As this study progresses, the ideogram and the dialectical image will
return for further discussion and illumination, as these concepts are de-
veloped and complicated by the other figures considered here. I direct the
application of these concepts toward a further understanding of a wide
range of literary and artistic production in America during the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, and this is an understanding in progress and
of process.

The Document in Collage and the Use of History

Both the ideogram and the dialectical image rely, in aesthetic practice,
on source texts or documents. Documentary collage refers to the use of
material presumed to have (factual) referential value to events outside
the work itself and often takes the form of passages from historical texts,
letters, newspapers, magazines, and other such public or “documentary”
46  Collage Form and Collage Theory
material. This “sense of the real provided by archival documentation
stands at the heart of Pound’s Cantos as of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades”
(Perloff, Unoriginal Genius 101). Such documentary collage techniques
often borrow the authority of source material—though it may also un-
dermine that authority, or even do both—while first decontextualizing
and then recontextualizing that material for the artist’s own purpose
and use. That is, the material is first extracted from its original context,
decentered by its separation, and then given a new context through its
juxtaposition in the text. It is thus infused with a new meaning without
the previous meaning ever being entirely evacuated. This dual meaning
underwrites much of the collage aesthetic’s revolutionary potential. Not
an unchanging fragment of reality, as if it were a separate entity inserted
into an otherwise coherent work, each element of the collaged material
becomes a part of a (newly fragmented) whole. This is one of the pri-
mary ways in which collage is anti-narrative. Each piece’s juxtaposition
with the others in a given work creates a new reality, even as it also
gestures back toward its prior context or external reality. In this way,
documentary material exceeds the simulacral status of “copy.”
The range of materials and techniques available to collage artists is a
focal point of every chapter that follows. A fragment is almost always
imbued with a sense of, and a use of, history. Often, the artist or writer
feels compelled to include a document in his or her work as a means of
preservation as well as of pedagogy. Records are saved from extinction—
or the purgatory of the archive—by inclusion in the text or artwork,
and simultaneously, the historical incident recorded is brought to new
light.38 This raises the question, what should be counted as “history?”
Many collage artists have felt the force of this question, including those
who use myth or are themselves marginalized by institutional histories.
For such artists, collage may facilitate a retelling of history by recuper-
ating material that was (intentionally or unintentionally) excluded from
earlier versions. This type of narrative disruption through juxtaposition
is also a form of pedagogy, and of revelation.
The first section of Susan Howe’s Singularities, entitled “Articulations
of Sound Forms in Time,” illustrates well the workings of the issues
that I have been discussing. The poem starts with a title page contain-
ing, besides the title, a wood block image (representing either land or
ocean, it is littered with dead bodies) and a brief quotation, unattributed
but set italic: “from seaweed said nor reposses rest/ scape esaid” (1)
(Figure 1.2). One turns the page to find the roman numeral “I,” a new
title, “The Falls Flight,” and another quotation, “Land! Land! Hath
been the idol of many in New England!” attributed to Increase Mather.
These brief quotations function as historical documents; while the one
attributed to a recognized figure of early American culture clearly falls
within the realm of what is considered the canonically historical, the
unattributed one, by virtue of its idiosyncratic and anachronistic syntax,
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  47

Figure 1.2  Excerpts from Singularities © 1990 by Susan Howe. ­Published by

Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.

diction, and spelling, cultivates the appearance of the historical despite

its lack of attribution or date. This section begins with a prose narration
of a particular attack called the “Falls Flight” by a group of Boston
militia-men on a camp of Native Americans. After the first paragraph,
there is a second one that consists only of a brief and again unattributed
quotation: “‘The Reverend Hope Atherton, minister of the gospel, at
Hatfield, a gentleman of publick spirit, accompanied the army.’” We
subsequently learn that the attack on the Native American camp was
unprovoked, occurring in the middle of the night:

This they immediately attacked by firing into the wigwams. Wak-

ened from sleep the frightened inhabitants thought they were being
raided by Mohawks. The chronicler writes: “They soon discovered
their mistake but being in no position to make an immediate defense
were slain on the spot, some in their surprise ran directly to the river,
and were drowned; others betook themselves to their bark canoes,
48  Collage Form and Collage Theory
and having in their confusion forgot their paddles, were hurried
down the falls and dashed against the rocks. In this action the enemy
by their own confession, lost 300, women and children included”.
(3)

Howe’s own narration here intertwines with that of the nameless

“chronicler” until she interjects, “What the historian doesn’t say is that
most of the dead were women and children.” There had been little dis-
tinction between Howe and the chronicler, except for an occasional
archaism in diction or spelling. This line removes forcefully from the
reader any certainty he or she may have as to the authenticity of the
previous unattributed citations. Its effect is to introduce a rather pointed
implication about the place of women and children in our accepted
histories of early America. Much of Howe’s writing is quite a bit less
straightforwardly rhetorical than this. The remainder of “Articulations
of Sound Forms in Time” is a poem that reworks the writings of Hope
Atherton, the minister mentioned in the quotation earlier, who was the
only civilian to accompany the raiding forces during the “Falls Flight.”
These sections are distinctly non-narratival, and use word play in the
way that some of Gertrude Stein’s poetry does. Only the titles themselves
give a hint of narrativity: “Hope Atherton’s Wanderings,” “Taking the
Forest.” The force of the introductory pages reflects back on the later
sections, and they on it, using juxtaposition to produce an illumination
that neither could produce on its own. Howe’s poetry here combines
aspects of what I have characterized as the ideogram and the dialectical
image. Her authorial interjections work to tear down myth—the myth
of a certain narrative of history—in order to allow a measure of what
she believes to be the truth (or at least a more accurate representation of
events) to shine through. Her form of interjection, within the context of
the work as a piece of discourse, works in a different register than the
examples from either Pound or Benjamin provided earlier. The authorial
voice is not given in separate sections, nor is it capitalized or set off in
any graphic form. These passages show the separation between her con-
ception of language, and the power of language, from those of Pound
or Benjamin; Howe’s adherence to what could be termed a postmodern
or poststructural understanding of the function and power of language
marks a historical difference and will form a distinction between many
of the writers from the latter half of the twentieth century and those of
the former.39

Myth, Memory, and Nostalgia

Myth, memory, and nostalgia are all aspects of personal and global his-
tories, but they often fit uncomfortably with the more obviously docu-
mentary aspects of collage. These concepts have been framed in collage
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  49
works sometimes in opposition to “official” histories; at other moments,
they work in parallel cooperation with the historical. The personal and
anecdotal nature of much of the material included in collage would seem
to be in contradiction to the purportedly objective, factual, and histori-
cal material particularly favored by the early theorists of collage.40 These
are more personal aspects of history, ones that would at one time be
described as “feminine” and ascribed to more traditionally sentimental
writers. Documentary collage often seeks to borrow some of the author-
ity and rationality from scientific, legal, and other discourses; this has
been a common technique particularly by those influenced by Pound’s
ideogrammic method. But these divisions are far from absolute. There
is no lack of myth or personal memories and histories in the Cantos, for
example.41 The documentary and the mythic aspects of collage often in-
tertwine and interact to reinforce or contradict each other, and these are
the places where the meaning and the limits of collage can be explored.
The varied ways in which personal history has been used in collage,
often in the form of memories, will form one significant aspect of the
analysis in this book. Many of those under discussion intertwined mem-
ories from their own lives with material from the larger world, including
Howe, Duncan, and Jess. Others, like Pound and Moore, used (relatively)
familiar stories from classical mythology in part as ciphers for more per-
sonal material. The examination of how these personal memories create
knowledge, as well as what kind of knowledge is being created, when it is
juxtaposed with the more institutionalized documents of history, will ex-
pose one aspect of the limits of collage. How do these very different kinds
of histories interact and reflect on one another? How can the inclusion
of the personal inform a work aimed at recovering something perceived
as lost or covered over by the passage of time, or by intentional excision?
Does the personal material maintain the same standard of evidence or
citation that the historical material does? The triumph of the personal,
the micro- or the idiosyncratic narrative over the grand, ­received, or
meta-­narrative is one form of what I’ve termed anti-­narrativity in col-
lage. The trajectory of collage as a historical development seems to be
away from the rational, scientific, and strictly historical, and toward the
subjective, personal, and anecdotal, but there is a complicated relation-
ship among these terms throughout this development.
Nostalgia, an alternative understanding of individual or group history,
is intimately connected with loss. The term usually refers to idealized or
romanticized feeling about the past; it implies that some feature of the
past that has been lost is sorely missed. Even those figures generally con-
sidered least prone to nostalgic yearning—those connected with mod-
ernism’s drive to “make it new” for instance—frequently reach back to a
time presumed to be “better” in some way than the present. B ­ enjamin’s
nostalgia has a mystical or religious aspect: he yearns for a past when
language retained its sacred aspect as a way to communicate with the
50  Collage Form and Collage Theory
divine. In this way, nostalgia takes on a revolutionary stance as the rec-
ognition of a better past world leads the way, through the dialectical
image, to future action. In both the dialectical image and the ideogram-
mic method, nostalgia, rather than being a conservative, and ultimately
solipsistic, emotion, becomes a galvanizing force for change. The weight
of “nostalgia”—for in the writing of both Pound and ­B enjamin, the past
world they are nostalgic for is one that is not likely to have existed—is
to shine a light on the inadequacy of the present and the emptiness of
common conceptions of progress. Thus, collage allows for a transforma-
tion of nostalgia into a powerful and active affective force, rather than a
passive and ineffectual one.
The question of history and what counts as historical is likewise con-
nected to nostalgia. If something from the past is in danger of being lost and
is important enough to be included in a documentary collage, how does
that align these figures with nostalgia, as well as with feelings of sentiment
and affect? Nostalgia’s place in this book is not the usual one whereby it
is seen as a retrograde force, inexorably leading one to an inward-­directed
loop of personal memory and mourning. Like historical knowledge, the
knowledge created by myth, by memory, and by nostalgia does not take
on a static form but rather is continually reshaped and ­reformed by new
events and contexts, and by its juxtaposition in a new context through
its use in collage. Like the “reality fragments” inserted into the earliest
collages, all of these more personal sources of material do not remain
static, or separate from the materials that surround them; the process of
their inclusion into the text or image allows for their transformation. The
cliché of the 1970s that the “personal is political” seems, in this respect,
to have been describing collage. As a critical and artistic form, it seems
to have been especially well suited to the meshing of the personal with
the social, the political, and the artistic that revolutionary-minded groups
have sought since the earliest years of the twentieth century.

Notes
1 I use the word graphemic to encompass the full range of graphic/visual
marks, including not only specifically formed letters or pictograms but also
stray marks, diacritical marks, and punctuation, whether they be on the
page, canvas, screen, or elsewhere.
2 The lines discussed here are ll. 425–34 of The Waste Land.
3 The information in this section is derived from Eliot’s notes to The Waste
Land.
4 Not truly nonsense, these “wailing” sounds evoke the choruses from ­R ichard
Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Like scat syllables sung in jazz, they do not contain
semantic meaning in themselves but rather gain this meaning through their
context, in this case their allusion to the opera.
5 C.f. the section in this chapter on Pound’s ideogrammic method.
6 Significant here is Eliot’s use of the first person possessive pronoun: “my”
ruin. In this, he would seem to propose a type of ownership of the fragments
which he uses, making his work more esoteric than exoteric.
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  51
7 This intrusion of reality has been the cause of Walter Benjamin’s and indeed
of many critics’ assertions that collage has a special claim to being a revo-
lutionary form of art. According to Susan Buck-Morss, “For Benjamin, the
technique of montage had ‘special, perhaps even total rights’ as a progressive
form because it ‘interrupts the context into which it is inserted’ and thus
‘counteracts illusion’…” (67).
8 Collage and, particularly, photomontage techniques have been used very
successfully by both the advertising industry and government propagandists
for nearly the same span of time as they have been used in the art world.
9 See Kenner, 296–7.
10 “More pertinently: is the surest way to a fructive western idea the mis-
understanding of a eastern one? Fenollosa’s rejection of phonetic charac-
ters not only did his literary studies no harm … but by encouraging him
to ­universalize his intuition about verbs and processes freed him, as more
scrupulous learning could not have, to compose the Ars Poetica of our
time” ­(Kenner 230). Cf. Kenner 203–31, as well as Fang, on Fenollosa’s and
Pound’s felicitous mistakes.
11 See chapter on “Imagism” in Kenner.
12 According to Donald Davie: “Few people have looked at Fenollosa and those
who have, have seen him through the spectacles of Ezra Pound…. [S]o long
as we see Fenollosa only in Pound’s terms, we only squint at him” ­(Articulate
Energy 40). I will continue to squint at Fenollosa in this chapter. Davie’s
chapter presents a strong inquiry into Fenollosa’s ideas themselves, as apart
from those of Pound. C.f., R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine.
13 See Pound’s “Letter to Iris Barry” of 24 August 1916 in The Selected Letters
of Ezra Pound.
14 Although Pound is being honest when he says that he did little to change
Fenollosa’s essay (his changes are mostly cosmetic, and those of an editor, not
a ghostwriter), this is one instance in which Pound’s changes make a ­major
impact. He excised much of the qualifying and explanatory l­anguage—
the sentences that act like the connecting words Fenollosa is here arguing
against—and thus makes this essay an example of as well as an argument
for the ideogrammic method. See YCAL MSS 53, Beineke Rare Books Room
and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
15 Virtù refers to what is perceived as a particularly masculine sort of power.
16 Of course, as Pound states in the section of Guide to Kulchur just cited,
“Knowledge is or may be necessary to understanding, but it weighs as
­nothing against understanding, and there is not the least use or need of
­retaining it in the form of dead catalogues once you understand process” (53,
­emphasis added). If knowledge (of facts) is not necessary to u ­ nderstanding
(of processes), it may be that Pound was not so much trusting his readers’
awareness as that they would understand as much as was necessary for them
to get at the process.
17 For the remainder of this section, I will be using the term “ideogram” as
Pound applied it to his writing (not in reference to the Chinese written
­language). Just as most of the Cantos contained several smaller ideograms
within their individual lines or strophes, each poem was a larger ideogram,
and the entire collection of poems was meant to be a single ideogram, the
largest of all. As Richard Sieburth has argued,
This technique of ideogrammic juxtaposition… is applied at a number
of levels in the Cantos. Only the scale of the units thus placed in relation
changes, ranging from single words or tag phrases to complete lines to
entire Cantos or sequences of Cantos.
(17)
52  Collage Form and Collage Theory
18 This canto was not originally so inscrutable. Pound’s intense revision of the
first three cantos, after their original publication, led to the excision of much
of the connections between the first three and “Canto IV.” Many of the
now-obscure references refer to other now-gone references in the original
version of the first three cantos. See Bush, 195–205.
19 The cultural resonances of this story have continued into the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. Both the 1989 Peter Greenaway film The
Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, and an episode of the animated
television show South Park (Episode 501: “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” orig-
inally aired July 11, 2001) have storylines that involve one individual being
forced to eat another as a form of punishment for a betrayal.
20 This information is derived from Terrell, 11–5; and Froula, 139–40.
21 Pound was clearly influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
22 “One culture may overlayer another; but the layers remain, and are meant
to remain, distinct. What is intended is a sort of lamination, by no means a
compounding or fusing of distinct historical phases into an undifferentiated
amalgam…. [This] is what Williams means by insisting that Pound’s object
is analysis, not synthesis” (Davie Ezra Pound 123).
23 Many have taken this image retrospectively as one of the poet himself,
hunted by his own unending project.
24 See Terrell, 13 and Kenner, 206–16 for these references.
25 In Douglas Mao’s essay, “How to Do Things with Modernism,” he explicitly
disagrees with this part of Bernstein’s argument:
In promotions of open form, meanwhile, there may be no point more
relentlessly pressed than that closed form mimes, and in doing colludes
with, repressive political structures…. Defenders of [closed form], of
course, might retort that works claiming to lay out grains and swatches
of reality non-judgmentally are as coercive as their overtly judging coun-
terparts, only perhaps more stealthily so, since the very process of selec-
tion will always be ideologically inflected.
(167–8)
While I completely agree with Mao’s point—that there is no inherent politics
associated with closed vs. open form—I don’t agree that the collage/montage
distinction (the one Bernstein makes) can easily be collapsed onto the open/
closed form distinction. From an intellectual standpoint, collage is a more
“open,” “readerly” form than montage, at least in the way that montage
developed during Eisenstein’s life. For most readers and viewers, though,
both collage and montage would appear to be “open” forms in the way that
a sonnet or a standard narrative film would not.
26 In his essay “Film Language” from 1934, Eisenstein states, “For many
film-makers montage and leftist excesses of formalism—are synonymous.
Yet montage is not this at all.
  For those who are able, montage is the most powerful compositional
means of telling a story” (111).
  Though there is a way in which this is clearly true—even a most cursory
glance at Eisenstein’s most famous films supports this claim—it is also, with
respect to Eisenstein’s earlier writings on the subject, hardly the endpoint
he had envisioned for montage. The fact that this essay was composed in
the wake of the Communist Party’s official stance in favor of social realism
seems significant.
27 Surely, the text of One Way Street stands as Benjamin’s first attempt at in-
terweaving the dialectical image in long form prose; The Arcades Project as
 Collage Form and Collage Theory  53
it stands now was his last. While it may be impossible to judge Benjamin’s
ultimate intentions regarding The Arcades Project, both the translators of
its currently published form and Buck-Morss seem convinced that it was
intended to stand as it is:
The fact that Benjamin also transferred masses of quotations from actual
notebooks to the manuscript of the script (including the use of numerous
epigraphs), might likewise bespeak a compositional principle at work
in the project, and not just an advanced stage of research. In fact, the
montage form—with its philosophic play of distances, transitions, and
intersections—had become a favorite device in Benjamin’s later investi-
gations…. What is distinctive about The Arcades Project—in ­B enjamin’s
mind, it always dwelt apart—is the working of quotations into the frame-
work of montage, so much so that they eventually far outnumber the
commentaries.
(Eiland and McLaughlin xi)
C.f. Buck-Morss, 67.
28 Poesis = making; krinein = cutting.
29 Benjamin always emphasizes the “historical” nature of all these.
30 “Profane illumination” is a phrase taken from Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism:
But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does
not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic,
anthropological inspiration to which hashish, opium, or whatever else
can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious
lesson is stricter.)
(209)
31 Benjamin describes language as a human attempt to reproduce nature mimet-
ically in sounds. Cf., Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and the ­Language of
Man.”
32 Jennings is using the word “name” here in the way one would usually use the
word “word.” Part of Benjamin’s theory of language purports that all words
are in fact “names” for what they reference.
33 It is not coincidental that the metaphoric example Benjamin chooses here
(the painted backdrop) is a type of artwork on several levels—both in the
sense that it is a painting and that it is used in theatrical productions. As
he further explicates in the essay now known as “The Work of Art in the Age
of Its Technological Reproducibility,” our relationship to art and our rela-
tionship to nature are deeply intertwined. This also is related to Benjamin’s
notion of the “aura” in artwork, the aspect of art that holds the viewer at a
distance, so he cannot critique it and understand its true nature.
34 Cf., Robert Kaufman, “Aura, Still.”
35 Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris—the first half of which takes place in the
­Passage de l’Opera—was the work that initially inspired The Arcades Project.
This combination of an interest in the objects and places of everyday life,
and in those parts of commodity culture that have recently gone out of style
or become obsolete, describes its major concerns. Yet, his admiration for
the movement was not without reservation. To Benjamin’s thinking, the
­Surrealists allowed themselves to fall too fully into their explorations of the
world of dreams and the unconscious. They did not do enough to politicize
their movement overtly, and their relationship to the Communist Party was
vexed at best.
36 However, Jessica Dubrow claims that
54  Collage Form and Collage Theory
the dialectical image—as fragment, anecdote, the exemplary, the ‘unique
extreme’—will only be a momentary flash of critical activity. For being
always awake, were that to be possible, would soon enough settle into
a new durability. Even the most vigilant consciousness would in time
become vulnerable to its own iteration of the same, inviting its own pact
with permanence.
(835)
Thus, the unending alarm clock would eventually settle into the “new normal.”
37 At one point, he even cites Theodor Adorno citing him in an article:
A Kierkegaard citation in Wiesengrund [Adorno], with commentary fol-
lowing: … ‘They may be called dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s ex-
pression, whose compelling definition of “allegory” also holds true for
Kierkegaard’s allegorical intention taken as a figure of historical dialectic
and mythical nature.’
(Arcades 461)
38 Of course, this is a simplification. For instance, it assumes that there is an
agreement about what is and what is not properly “historical.”
39 In his article, “Appropriating Primal Indeterminacy: Language, Landscape
and Postmodern Poetics in Susan Howe’s Thorow,” Will Montgomery argues
that Howe’s excision of the prose introduction in “Thiefth,” her sound record-
ing of “Thorow,” entitled amounts to a “strong revision” of the poem, which
he associates with a desire to erase that introduction and its ­association with its
historical moment’s investment in a particular brand of theory. While I agree
that the recorded sound version of the poem does reflect back on the textual
version, I would argue that, as with most works of collage, this sound collage
retains fragments of the original within itself, allowing the listener to reflect
upon the content of the text as she listens to the new version. The old context
is not erased, but rather revitalized through Howe’s revision of her work.
40 By “historical,” I mean the history that is recorded in books and public
documents, not in oral histories, photo albums, fables, and other often mar-
ginalized sources.
41 For instance, “Canto IV,” analyzed earlier in this chapter, is full of refer-
ences to mythologies of various sorts.
2 Logical Sentiment

Truth may be defined as fact interpreted, a discursive or poetic func-

tion bound to models of authority that are related to, but not limited
by, scientific inquiry.1 Marianne Moore, in her long poem “Marriage,”
and Muriel Rukeyser, in the even longer “U. S. 1,” use documentary
collage as a form of evidence, staking out a position for poetry that
attempts to bridge the gap between “fact” and “truth.” In these two
works, each distinctive in its author’s oeuvre, both female poets reject
the older, sentiment-­based model of “feminine” poetry and instead cul-
tivate an apparently objective and disinterested position with regard to
the subject matter; formally, they both use documentary collage, the
direct citation of outside source material that is incorporated into the
poetry. Moore and Rukeyser’s use of documentary collage grants au-
thority to their claims concerning wrongs done to others. Their poetry
thus constitutes a type of testimony, one closely related to the tradi-
tional, legal definition of testimony through the concept of the trial; this
definition departs from—though is also related to—the more recent use
of the term in trauma-­based, psychoanalytically influenced literary and
cultural theories. 2
In the opening pages of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Felman
claims that

testimony is the literary—or discursive—mode par excellence of our

times, and… our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony.
What is the significance of this growing predominance of testimony
as a privileged contemporary mode of transmission and communica-
tion? Why has testimony in effect become at once so central and so
omnipresent in our recent cultural accounts of ourselves?
(5–6; emphasis in original)

The initial claim concerning testimony appears intuitive: a brief review

of contemporary cultural surroundings will reveal an increasing num-
ber of memoirs, autobiographies, and other related works populating
best-seller lists. Perhaps even more pertinent to this discussion are the
56  Logical Sentiment
examples from social media, blogs, talk shows, reality television, and
even many documentary films, all of which share the discursive impulse
to expose “truth” as defined from a personal viewpoint. The following
questions—regarding why testimony has become so important to our
culture—are harder to answer. Felman’s answers to these questions rely
on the aftereffects of the mass traumas of World War II, primarily the
Holocaust. A corollary to this response might offer up, as an explana-
tion, the greatly increased access to media of self-expression that is now
available, even to those who had neither the education nor the class posi-
tion that formerly was necessary to gain access to the position of author.
The texts that I analyze here belong to a different moment, prior to
the mass traumas of World War II (though not the Freudian introduc-
tion of the term following the trench experiences of World War I) and to
the expansion of the media. As of the 1930s, the “letter to the editor”
model was still the dominant avenue of access that an average individual
would have to the media. Although Felman and Laub’s use of the term
“testimony” differs from the legal use of the term, the definition Felman
provides is provocative:

In its most traditional, routine use in the legal context—in the court-
room situation—testimony is provided, and is called for, when the
facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear,
when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its
supporting elements of evidence are called into question. The legal
model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and cul-
turally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. The trial both
derives from, and proceeds by, a crisis of evidence, which the verdict
must resolve.
(6; emphasis in original)

There are two important phrases here, which become elided at para-
graph’s end: the crisis of truth and the crisis of evidence. Without what
Felman terms a “crisis of truth,” there is no trial; for, factual truth, and
the search for truth when facts are absent or unclear, is the necessary
and given condition for the trial. Yet, as truth may be subjective, the
trial cannot necessarily be determined by “truth” alone. Truth, as given
by testimony, depends on individuals, but individuals may, despite their
oaths to the contrary, subvert the truth in many ways. A witness might,
for example, lie, omit important items (intentionally or not), have a faulty
or selective memory, or simply do a poor job of representing his version
of “truth.” Thus, verdicts in trials are ideally decided on matters of evi-
dence, and what matters in a trial is what you can prove. To retreat a few
logical steps, though, for Felman to posit that a crisis of truth (or even of
evidence) is necessary for a “trial” to take place is disingenuous; the right
to trial, strictly speaking, accompanies democratic citizenship. 3 It will
 Logical Sentiment  57
happen—barring a ceding of this right by the accused (and sometimes,
it happens still)—regardless of whether the “evidence” is in dispute. If
the trial—the testing—of evidence and of truth is consistently necessary
in a representative democracy, then it would seem that truth under such
conditions must be recognized as being constantly in crisis; it also indi-
cates that evidence and truth are not mutually constitutive categories. It
is within the context of these discursive crises that documentary poetry
asserts a different way of understanding both “truth” and “fact.”
The inevitable fragility of “truth” as a categorical function of lan-
guage is enforced by Felman’s further elaboration of her definition of
testimony:

In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not pos-

sess itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self
transparency of knowledge. Testimony is, in other words, a discur-
sive practice, as opposed to a pure theory. To testify—to vow to tell,
to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for
truth—is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formu-
late a statement.
(5; emphasis in original)

The use of testimony in collage poetry shares some characteristics with

this definition. Particularly, it shares the sense of language being put to a
test, to trial. Through the trials of language, collage poetry becomes the
proving ground for the crucial distinction between “truth” and “fact.”
Traditionally, poets have seen the making of truth claims as part of their
responsibility, but (perhaps ironically) largely in the same way that ­Felman
here claims testimony can: in the realm of the personal.4 The collage po-
etry of Moore and Rukeyser, unlike that in the tradition of the lyric, lays
aside its surface-level claim to personal truth in order to make broader
claims, ones that attempt to bridge the quickly growing gap ­between
“truth” (traditional domain of religion, philosophy, memory, and the
senses) and “fact” (domain of science, law, history, and ­technology). In
the cases of the texts under consideration here, it does so because both
­poets are responding to an urgent need on the part of others, against
whom wrongs have been done.
Moore and Rukeyser both respond to questions similar to those asked
by two theorists of ways in which individuals may view, and respond to,
images of human suffering. In her follow-up to the massively influential
On Photography (1977) entitled Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan
Sontag asks, “What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from
acknowledging it?” (40). Art historian Griselda Pollock, writing on the
work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger, has asked, “Who are
we now when we look back at… any sight of extreme human s­ uffering?”
(172) and, “How do we look back, remember trauma, and how do
58  Logical Sentiment
we respond to the victims, and to ourselves as their witnesses?” (188)
Moore and Rukeyser’s collage poetry explores if a poem “is capable of
representing things in language without co-opting and colonizing them”
­(Bazin 125). Both poets mean to give evidence against these wrongs
done against others, to respond to and to testify against these wrongs in
a forum where such evidence has been neither erased nor blocked.

*****

Marianne Moore’s documentary collage poetry is intensely citational,

though quotations in her poems are not always marked off as such. For
Moore, quotation offers a means to facilitate a poetry that approaches
the world with an intent to observe and discriminate—as a scientist
approaches a laboratory experiment—but that also moves toward a
solution to a problem that may exceed any scientific treatment or under-
standing. Moore’s early interest in the sciences led her to bring the hab-
its of observation, particularly observation of the physical world (plants
and animals) to the craft of poetry. The scientific method demands care-
ful observation so that one might marshal all evidence pertaining to a
problem at hand, even if that evidence contradicts one’s own hypothesis
or the received knowledge about the subject at the time; like her po-
etic techniques, for Moore, the scientific method could be a “procedural
means of ensuring perceptual and analytic discipline” (Anderson 84).
She adapts such scientific methods to her collage poetics as a means of
addressing the large questions she thought were the poet’s responsibility
to answer, or at least to consider. Lisa Steinman describes how “Moore’s
purpose was to emphasize how all human encounters with the world—
be they scientific, industrial, or literary—are similar in that they involve
reclassifying, revaluing, and so in some sense, changing the world” (119).
The ability to change the world through language—through language’s
transformational possibility—is one of the powers that collage claims for
itself. To Moore, science, as well as other topics rarely claimed as the do-
main of poetry, such as business and technology, was no less significant a
part of the creative and spiritual life than literature. Thus, she did not see
borrowing scientific techniques to understand philosophical questions
as something outside of the vocation of the poet. In this way, she began,
long before considering the moral and ethical issues she ­grapples with in
“Marriage,” to cross the space dividing “fact” from “truth.”
The store of materials that Moore archived for her documentary col-
lage poems was deep and eclectic. While she was drawn to rigorously
scientific documents (as in many of her “animal” poems such as “The
Plumed Basilisk”) as well as traditionally literary ones (such as the use
of Milton’s Paradise Lost in “Marriage”), she has frequently adapted
passages from sources that have little overt bearing on either disci-
pline. Her broad interest in culture in all of its guises—from business
 Logical Sentiment  59
to baseball—is consistent with her generally scientific approach to her
writing. Her tendency to use quotations from texts of “little standard
value” is also, according to Elizabeth Gregory, “an attempt to resituate
authority in the ordinary, in the present, and (via the originality of the
attempt) in… herself” (Quotation 175). Although it is part of the collage
poet’s responsibility to seek out all the relevant material and to evaluate
what among it is most worthy of inclusion in a poem, Moore is reluctant
to restrict her consideration of any material. Promotional business pam-
phlets are just as valid for her purposes as the great classics of literature
are.5 The range of materials can easily be seen in a later poem like “Four
Quartz Crystal Clocks” (1940). Inspired by a pamphlet the poet received
with her phone bill, the poem evolves—via Moore’s manipulation of it—
into one considering the meaning of time in relation to science as well as
human experience and mythology:6

There are four vibrators, the world’s exactest clocks;

and these quartz time-pieces that tell
time intervals to other clocks,
these worksless clocks work well;
independently the same, kept in
the 41º Bell
  Laboratory time
vault.
(ll. 1–8)7

The information in this first section (all but the last word are part of the
first stanza) is imported almost verbatim (though rearranged) from the
Bell Laboratories pamphlet. This documentary section of a phone bill has
been transformed into a poem about accuracy. Its eponymous clocks, the
“exactest” in the world, are the ones that other clocks are set by, thus
­setting the standard for punctuality. In this, they achieve a type of facticity.
In the next section, Moore translates some of the words from the pam-
phlet into French, transitioning into an equally documentary section,
this time selected from a contemporary issue of Le Figaro, a conservative
French newspaper. Specifically, her collage poem includes quotations
from an article discussing the late career of Jean Giraudoux, French au-
thor, as a wartime propagandist.

Checked by a comparator with Arlington,

they punctualize the “radio,
cinéma,” and “presse,”—a group the
Giraudoux truth-bureau
of hoped-for accuracy has termed
“instruments of truth.” We know—
60  Logical Sentiment
 as Jean Giraudoux says,
certain Arabs have not heard—that Napoleon
is dead;
(ll. 8–16)

These crystal clocks regulate the frequencies of radio, and maintain the
time for cinema newsreels and periodical press—the communications
media, conduits of information, or “truth,” for the modern world. Yet,
truth remains intractably relative and subjective. As the “Arabs” who
don’t know what we know (“that Napoleon is dead”) show, inexact or
mistimed information (facts) causes a shift in what can be constructed
to be the “truth” at any given time. Neither accuracy nor technology can
overcome intransigent local world views, which may maintain different
versions of the “truth” for any given group. “Repetition, with / the sci-
entist, should be / synonymous with accuracy” (ll. 24–6), which is to say
that in a scientific experiment, results are proved valid by a scientist’s
ability to obtain the same results more than once. For a scientist’s results
to make the leap from “fact” to “truth,” he has to be able to produce this
fact multiple times: “truth,” in science, is established through repetition.
The passage of time reminds us, however, that “repetition,” per se, is a
falsehood; no moment is ever the same as any other moment. As the clocks
in the first stanza make clear, the passage of time (and its marking) ensures
that each moment is singular. In language, the poet must be certain that
the lulling effects of repetition do not sway her from the path of accuracy:

The lemur-student can see

that an aye-aye is not

an angwan-tíbo, potto, or loris. The sea

side burden should not embarrass
the bell-boy with the buoy-ball
endeavoring to pass
hotel patronesses; nor could a
practiced ear confuse the glass
  eyes for taxidermists

with eye-glasses from the optometrist.

(ll. 17–26)

The “aye-aye,” “angwan-tíbo,” “potto,” and “loris” are all, as a “lemur-­

student” indeed ought to know, different kinds of monkeys—though they
share many physical and genetic similarities with each other (and with
humans) and, as Moore has so adroitly exploited here, many sounds in
their names. Repetition in the language even of scientific classification has
 Logical Sentiment  61
no guarantee of accuracy in the absence of a “practiced ear.” S­ imilarity
in sound, the music of poetry, does not guarantee similarity in meaning
any more than eyeglasses are exchangeable for glass eyes. Thus, part of
the “truth” of poetry’s traditional function, that of melopoeia, can also
lead to “not-truth,” or inaccuracy, when the similarity of sounds leads
one to false conclusions.
As the poem comes to a close, it articulates the final conflict between
scientific time, structured and measured by human instruments, and
mythological time:

And as
Meridian-7 one-two
one-two gives, each fifteenth second
in the same voice, the new
data—“The time will be” so and so—
you realize that “when you
  hear the signal,” you’ll be
hearing Jupiter or jour pater, the day god—
the salvaged son of Father Time—
telling the cannibal Chronos
(eater of his proxime
newborn progeny) that punctuality
is not a crime.
(ll. 27–39)

Technology, which “makes” time even as it measures it, also destroys

our sense of wonder at its achievements: the banality of a recorded voice
over the phone telling the exact time at any given moment flattens out
the complexity of the technological advances that have contributed to
this possibility (the absolute precision of the measurement of time as well
as the ability for any person with a phone to know the exact time, at any
time), and dulls our response to the inescapability of the passing of each
individual, unrepeatable second.8
The ineluctable passage of time—determined and recorded by the
crystal clocks as a version of “fact”—enters the realm of truth through
its associations with death. The singularity of time, therefore, has be-
come a concept for which mythology has commonly been used to aid in
its understanding. Moore’s characteristic dry wit—humor is often the
most obvious sense of emotion evident in her poem—can be seen at the
end of the poem, in the homophonic repetition of Jupiter’s name as “jour
pater,” in the purposeful misspelling of Cronos’s name as ­“Chronos,”
father time, and, in the final words, the comical understatement that,
“punctuality / is not a crime.” While punctuality is of course not a
crime, the entire world of scientificity and technology that goes along
62  Logical Sentiment
with punctuality is also only a part of what the human experience offers.
Myth is associated with “truth” in the sense in which it has been seen
as one of poetry’s traditional responsibilities; myth, expressed in poetry,
has been one of the human methods of explaining the inexplicable, par-
ticularly the inexplicably horrible events that occur. Thus, it takes on
the function of truth, and serves the purpose of truth as its images recur
over time, even when other, more factual explanations are known. Myth
time may be as important as factual time in the structure of any given
reality—as for those who still believe in the existence of Napoleon—and
it may aid us in understanding those aspects of human existence that
clocks can only record.
Moore’s collage technique aims to give the appearance of providing
the widest possible range of viewpoints on the question at hand, so as to
come to the best-informed evaluation. In “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks,”
the poet uses a documentary collage of quite banal material (advertising
and newspaper articles) to create a poem investigating the large questions
of human existence. (What is the meaning of life? How do we explain our
existence and other seemingly inexplicable occurrences therein? And what
is the best use of human inventions and abilities?) Her juxtapositional
documentary collage technique allows for contradictory viewpoints to be
contained by one poem in the interests of achieving what must seem like
a fair and rational judgment, and in getting outside of received knowledge
or set convention.9 Christanne Miller describes “the enabling neutrality”
of Moore’s poetic technique as, “positional rather than ­emotional—that
is, she creates a distance between speaker, poet, and reader without sac-
rificing emotional presence” (120). This distance (or what I describe as
her cultivation of the appearance of “disinterestedness”), combined with
her facility for physical description, is one part of what I have described
as her evidentiary or testimonial technique, her attempt to bridge the gap
between truth and fact, as she puts language to a trial.
Moore’s proclivity to maintain this distance, even to insist upon it, is
also why she can be seen as emotionless—and this is at least partially
due to the fact that, as a female poet, there was a certain amount of
“sentimentality” many critics and readers may have implicitly expected
of her. Moore’s poetry, which is certainly not without emotion, resists
sentimentality. Ezra Pound, in his 1918 review of the Others anthol-
ogy, claimed that Moore’s poetry “has none of the stupidity beloved of
the ‘lyric enthusiast’” and coined the term “logopoeia,” or “a dance of
the intelligence among words and ideas” in part to describe her poetry,
along with that of Mina Loy (424–5). The apparent lack of clichéd sen-
timent is well-suited to a poetry that intends to provide a legalistic type
of testimony—one that can permit itself little, if any, show of emotion,
even when dealing with emotionally charged subjects. As Heather Cass
White, writing of Moore’s review of Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Obser-
vations, writes,
 Logical Sentiment  63
Moore chooses [a persona] of the “hardened reviewer,” a male figure
who, presumably, curses Eliot out of noble-mindedness rather than
a sense of personal injury. This persona allows Moore the strength
of disinterestedness; a male reviewer cannot be accused of partisan
feelings in objecting to “ungallantry”.
(492)

While in “Marriage,” as I will discuss, Moore chooses not one per-

sona but the many voices of her documentary sources, a similar effect
is achieved: by appearing not to speak from a viewpoint that could be
described as “personal,” Moore avoids the nearly automatic assumption
that any unmarried woman critiquing the institution of marriage must
be writing from a place of bitterness or anger caused by personal slight
or heartbreak.
The coolness in tone that many of the poems evidence is similarly
well-suited to Moore’s experimental project. I mean to use the word
“experimental” literally: related to the action of trying anything, or put-
ting it to proof—a test or trial.10 Moore’s intellectual project is directed
broadly toward the goals of examination and comprehension. Unobjec-
tionable as this may initially seem, when directed at entrenched social
institutions like, say, marriage, such goals become more difficult to enact
without the distancing techniques that she finds in documentary collage.
So, she uses

… quotation marks [to] indicate a distancing from what is said, so

that if there’s a dark voice to be heard in the poem it is sometimes
given the quotation. And this is a negative voice, that marriage has
to undergo a trial in some way.
(Willis 195)

To put marriage to a trial is a risky maneuver indeed for an unmarried

female poet in the early years of the twentieth century. Moore’s use of
documentary collage allows for this distancing without sacrificing the
stringency of her trial of language.
These documentary collage techniques, however, have led to Moore’s
poetry often appearing difficult to readers because of the complexities
of her diction and syntax. These complexities are connected to her at-
traction to sources—attributed or not—from disparate times and places.
Because she sometimes deploys quotations in her work without the ex-
pected punctuation marks (thereby smoothing over the syntax a small
amount), she conceals the status of many of her quotations. By not using
quotation marks in the expected way, Moore obscures the distinction
between the sections of her poem that are personal statements, and those
that are the statements of another. As Eric Walker describes it, “This
elusiveness [regarding tone]… stems not from the manifest eccentricity
64  Logical Sentiment
of the method… but from the poem’s necessarily marauding maneuvers
to scribble all over the impervious base of the most imperial of modern
social forms” (209). This intentional confusion between the personal
and the citational thus enables the distanced perspective mentioned ear-
lier, and on a topic that is, particularly for a female poet, considered to
be in the realm of cloyingly emotional and clichéd sentiment; her use of
documentary collage is an example of a “modernist distancing device,”
used to “keep emotion in check” (Rieke 158). The previous analogy
with the scientific method remains applicable here, and more so, her col-
lage technique provides a type of microscope under which a particular
topic can be placed. Each individual quotation, as a piece of “evidence,”
provides a microscopic look at one possible outcome or position, all of
which should add up to a basis for making a decision. In addition to
mobilizing the structures and language of science to ward off excessive
emotion, Moore used quotations to present opposing, often controver-
sial, viewpoints on hotly debated topics to allow a distance between
her name and any particular viewpoint represented in the poem, using
documentary collage “as a disguise for the self” (Leavell Visual Arts
126). She can present quite controversial views without risking her own
reputation (as a respectable “lady” poet), while maintaining her coolly
analytical stance. Miller writes that “Moore’s radicalism is decorously
clothed,” with respect to the poet’s habits of dress, and yet this sentiment
is just as true in her poetry (Cultures 103). As a female poet, the evasive
maneuvers of documentary collage aided her; she herself was not judged
as someone having loose morals or radical ideas even as she presented
ideas that were outside the norm for society at her time on topics such as
marriage and religion.11
Specifically, in her long collage poem, “Marriage,” Moore manipulates
her source texts to present a variety of differing opinions on the topic
of marriage, sometimes going so far as to use material that did not, in
its original form, even refer to marriage. These quotations serve Moore
as “enablers and ironizers,” allowing her to establish both an emotional
and positional distance (Gregory, Quotation 179). This is how the poem
constitutes a type of testimony. This testimony is not to a wrong directly
done to the poet herself, or even to a narrative persona who speaks di-
rectly to the audience.12 Rather, her poem testifies to wrongs done to
many others: all those men and women (though primarily women) who
have been harmed through a socially enforced standard of universal
marriage. As well, she attests to the harm done to the mythical first cou-
ple, Adam and Eve, and later to a host of others, literary, “real,” or some
combination of the two. The unacknowledged documentary source for
Moore’s narrative here, such as it is, is Milton’s Paradise Lost. Unlike
Milton’s version of them, however, Moore’s Adam and Eve seem to exist
simultaneously in the Eden of mythic time as well as in a contemporary
but unspecified setting.
 Logical Sentiment  65
The poem opens in a characteristically analytical way, making use of
the language of law and commerce:

This institution,
perhaps one should say enterprise
out of respect for which
one says one need not change one’s mind
about a thing one has believed in,
requiring public promises
of one’s intention
to fulfill a private obligation:
I wonder what Adam and Eve
think of it by this time,
this fire-gilt steel
alive with goldenness;
how bright it shows—
“of circular traditions and impostures,
committing many spoils,”
requiring all one’s criminal ingenuity
to avoid!
(ll. 1–17)

The section in quotation marks, “of circular traditions and impostures, /

committing many spoils,” Moore attributes in the notes to her ­Complete
Poems to St. Francis. More precisely, it was taken from an Encyclopedia
Britannica article on the saint, and the original referent did not address
marriage but knowledge.13 This collaged quotation from St.  Francis
also initiates one of the repeating motifs of the poem, the circular or
near-­circular form: the “vibrating cymbal” (l. 75), the “potent apple”
(l. 146), the eyes of the blue and basalt panthers (ll. 164–5), the ­butterfly
­substituting for a wedding ring (ll. 224–7), the “cycloid inclusiveness”
(l. 267), and the “egg—a triumph of simplicity” (ll. 269–70). A regular
pattern of overlapping circles predominates, both in the poem’s collage
technique and in its imagery, and further recalls the Poundian ideo-
gram of “ply over ply” in which imbricated historical images overlay
one another to become a new image, yet the multiple older ones each
maintain part of their original specificity. The circle is most obviously
reminiscent of the wedding band, the symbol of infinity, never-ending
union. Here transformed into “circular traditions,” it becomes a form of
eternal sameness, “going in circles,” with the unnamed couples doomed
to repeat the same mistakes for as long as the tradition or convention
itself remains unexamined. Moore has taken on the job of examining
that circle here, as the collage poet and her collage form perform a sim-
ilar examination of modern (and lyric) poetry. She uses her microscopic
analysis in order to see whether this institution/ enterprise is worthy of
66  Logical Sentiment
the high public esteem in which it has been held in Anglo-American mo-
dernity, or whether the compromises it demands of its adherents, and the
requisite pain they suffer, might be too much to ask of anyone.
The final lines of the first section, with no indication that they are
a quotation, describe “marriage,” as an institution that “require[es] all
one’s criminal ingenuity/ to avoid!” (ll.16–7) The association here of
the unmarried with criminals (and clever ones at that) reflects a keen
­awareness of the social, religious, and legal forces at work to support,
enforce, and insist upon the legitimacy and rightness of marriage, for
everyone. Moore’s use of the word “criminal” “echoes the medical and
legal ­prohibitions of the turn of the century and the present, which
­classify… existence outside of marriage as a crime,” as well as the as-
sociation of “deviant” sexualities with “criminality” (Kent 181). These
lines exemplify how Moore’s convoluted syntax and her analytical tone
allow her to conceal her most radical statements.14 Coming at the end
of a five-clause sentence, and after a documentary quotation, it is all too
easy to pass by this phrase while reading, as one hurries on (perhaps with
some relief) to the beginning of a new sentence. As well, the enjambment
here (“criminal ingenuity/ to avoid”) gives the lines a “swerving” effect,
as it results in a statement which is likely to be the opposite of what was
expected. The distanced tone (though one full of irony and archness)
provides a kind of deflection for the moment, and allows the poet to con-
tinue her pursuit of an “objective” examination of marriage, of putting
language to a trial.
Unlike many other (male) collage poets, Moore rarely sought the “au-
thority” of her quotations per se. That is, she did not choose to cite from
particular authors for their familiarity or prestige, in either a positive or
a negative sense; her quotations are often used to “undermine textual
‘authority’ and genre,” as Susan McCabe claims (227).15 Her sources
are often either so arcane or so banal as not to matter in such counts,
and she rarely provided accurate or extensive notes. This aspect of her
collage technique allows her to avoid drawing attention away from the
task at hand—the scientific analysis of marriage—while simultaneously
eliding the editorial lack of restraint she wielded over her sources, which
might have become obvious had she provided extensive notes, or even
complete and fully marked quotations. Rather, her documentary sources
serve her as pieces of evidence: they are valuable for their content, not
their origin. Their perspectives differ from one that could be derived
from Moore’s own biography. These differing perspectives provide the
illusion (if not the reality) of a kind of objectivity. The questions with
which the poem is concerned appear to be held up to a kind of rational
observational process. Different voices are given a chance to air their
views, with the understanding that a decision should be reached from
among all possible choices. The poet relieves herself of responsibility to
 Logical Sentiment  67
make more strident claims against marriage, letting her evidence speak
for itself.
Because so much of the poem consists of quotations, attributed or
not, its tone can be difficult to judge, and therefore a critical debate has
sprung up over whether “Marriage” is pro- or anti-“marriage.” Lynn
Keller describes how this debate hinges on:

what weight or tone to attach to particular statements within [the

poem]…. The bits and pieces in various voices and shifting tones
taken from diverse contexts that Moore incorporates into “Mar-
riage” are worked into an apparently cohesive whole, cemented into
close relation through her elaborately extended syntax.
(220)

The web of variously attributed and unattributed quotations—both in

the notes and in the text itself—that makes up this collage poem can lead
a reader to have only a faint idea of the poet’s tone is toward her subject,
but also little notion of who is speaking, or to what or whom a certain
quotation refers, leading the poem to “abandon the synthesizing power
of a unifying perspective” (Pollack 126). For instance, relatively late in
the poem, there is the story of

This model of petrine fidelity

who “leaves her peaceful husband
only because she has seen enough of him”—
(ll. 287–9)

which is immediately followed by these lines:

that orator reminding you,

“I am yours to command.”
“Everything to do with love is mystery;
it is more than a day’s work
to investigate this science.”
(ll. 290–4)

Moore cites the first quotation as follows:

Simone Puget, advertisement entitled ‘Change of Fashion,’ English

Review, June 1914: ‘Thus proceed pretty dolls when they leave their
old homes to renovate their frame, and dear others who may aban-
don their peaceful husband only because they have seen enough of
him.’
(Collected Poems 272)
68  Logical Sentiment
The next quotation is unattributed, and the third is cited as: “F. C. ­Tilney,
Fables of La Fontaine, ‘Love and Folley,’ Book XII, No. 14” (Collected
Poems 272).16 In a few lines, the breadth of documentary evidence that
Moore brings to this discussion is visible. From mass media, she quotes
an advertisement, one that is cynical about the possibilities of mar-
riage, due to what is seen as feminine capriciousness. On a syntactic
level, it is unclear exactly how to interpret this passage, and yet the
brief phrase that Moore inserts before it, “This model of petrine fidel-
ity,” may give us some help. “Petrine” refers to followers or qualities
of St. Peter; it may also refer to marriages that are dissolved due to one
partner being baptized, and the other unbaptized. We are not to take
this advertisement entirely seriously as a description of a problem in
contemporary marriages: given the severe inequality in economic and
legal power between men and women at that time, the few wives who
might have had the means necessary to divorce their husbands were
nevertheless unlikely to be granted that divorce without incontrovert-
ible proof of adultery or desertion. The next lines contain the “orator
reminding you, /‘I am yours to command.’” The image of an orator
does not sit well with that of one offering up such a self-abnegating
proclamation. The documentary evidence provided by these lines sug-
gests that gendered power balances in marriage are not always what
they seem; that the one who publicly plays the servant may in fact be
the master. Finally, the lines:

Everything to do with love is mystery;

it is more than a day’s work
to investigate this science.
(ll. 255–7)

further complicate the view of love and marriage through their disjunc-
ture of “mystery” and “science.” The sentence structure here suggests
that “mystery” is equivalent (or at least related) to “science,” and yet
this does not conform to common usage. Science may be a mystery to
most readers, because of ignorance; however, for the scientist, admitting
that anything properly within the realm of the “scientific” is a “mys-
tery” could be seen as a failure. By itself, the first phrase represents a
stereotypical and sentimental view (precisely what the poem has to this
point avoided); when it is paratactically connected to the second one,
with its language of business and technology—“work” and “science”—
this collage of quotations grants to the reader the disjuncture between
“fact” and “truth.” In the mythology of love, “mystery” is equivalent
to “truth”—that which is unknowable, eternal, never-changing. All of
these terms are associated with women: the eternal truth about women
is that they are a mystery (the “dark continent,” in Freud’s colonialist
designation). This passage is a fine example of what I earlier described as
 Logical Sentiment  69
the process through which collage can subject language to a trial: here,
Moore submits several phrases to a type of contextual trial, juxtaposing
them despite their lack of a coherent context. This tactic compels the
reader to test out various possible contexts in order to discover which,
if any, might matter. In this process, the reader may come to a greater
understanding of the problem that is at hand than if she had been given
a straightforward explanation.
The second half of this sentence repudiates all that is mysterious and
eternal through the fact-based language of business and science. Though
the economics of marriage have not escaped this narrator, the way in
which love is a science is more obscure. This may be one of the few
places in this nearly 300-line poem on marriage in which its physical
aspects come into play. Sexuality and childbearing (purportedly the pur-
pose behind marriage) are (almost) never explicitly mentioned; however,
if love itself is a “science,” then that “science” surely must be biology.17
If it is “more than a day’s work” to investigate that science, then perhaps
marital fidelity and loyalty are not the instantaneous by-products of the
marital ceremony, but rather develop after time and effort on the part
of the relevant parties. Perhaps this is Moore’s way of informing her
reader about the economics of her own work as a poet—that, despite her
dismissive protestations in the “Notes” concerning the seriousness of
her collage technique, pursuing this investigation of love and marriage is
more than a mere “fancy.”18
Moore’s refusal to allow her evidentiary investigation to become an
emotional one belies the expectations from a poem entitled “Marriage,”
particularly one written by a woman. Her skepticism with respect to
sentimentality also extends to what might be termed the “science” of
emotions, psychology, as she states:

Psychology which explains everything

explains nothing,
and we are still in doubt.
(ll. 18–20)

Moore’s refusal to grant psychology the status of “truth” here is due to

its claims to facticity: because it claims that it “explains everything,” like
facts, or statistics, therefore, it really “explains nothing.” The circularity
of this skeptical passage is reminiscent of the “circular traditions”—
modern traditions, like that of psychology, can be equally circular, and
fail to increase the understanding of the problems at hand, when they
too fail to merge fact and truth.
Descriptions of the physical beauty of the world—both its inhabitants
and its scenery—form a major part of the content of the poem, and
its lush description stands as an outlier in the text. This is one way in
which we can see the influence of Paradise Lost. However, Moore’s use
70  Logical Sentiment
of adjectives is rarely straightforward, particularly when they are unusu-
ally effusive, as they are here.

Eve: beautiful woman—

I have seen her
when she was so handsome
she gave me a start,
able to write simultaneously in three languages—
English, German and French—
and talk in the meantime;
(ll. 21–7)

The sections of the poem Moore devotes to the descriptions of Eve and
Adam (that is the order in which they are introduced) provide ample
examples of the ways in which her diction produces an obscure view of
her simultaneously mythic and contemporary characters; her refusal of
straightforward narration enforces her desire to use documentary col-
lage to put language to trial, to test poetry’s ability to create knowledge.
Bethany Hicok notes how rarely Moore uses the first person pronoun
in her poetry and claims that Moore’s insertion of the line, “I have seen
her” “introduces the speaker and even perhaps the reader as mutual
spectators in the contemplation of Eve… Oddly enough, the speaker’s
claim also puts the ‘I’ of the poem in the position of Satan,” with respect
to Moore’s major literary source for the poem, Paradise Lost (66). The
possible alignment of the poem’s speaker with Satan provides a tantaliz-
ing possibility given the lack of identifiable human characteristics that
the poem provides for the speaker.
Moore’s description of the linguistically and discursively gifted Eve,
who can write in multiple languages simultaneously, is cited from an ar-
ticle in Scientific American about a woman who could do just that. The
note in Collected Poems to this effect reads:

Miss A______ will write simultaneously in three languages, English,

German, and French, talking in the meantime. [She] takes ­advantage
of her abilities in everyday life, writing her letters simultaneously
with both hands; namely, the first, third, and fifth words with her
left and the second, fourth, and sixth with her right hand. While
generally writing outward, she is able as well to write inward with
both hands. “Multiple Consciousness or Reflex Action of Unaccus-
tomed Range,” Scientific American, January 1922.
(271)

While Eve is described in this poem as beautiful and gifted, the form
that her gifts take—or at least the use to which she puts them—is trivial,
 Logical Sentiment  71
a kind of sideshow act, playing on the stereotype of the constantly talk-
ative woman. As McCabe has argued,

By excising and remaking a fragment from a scientific journal (albeit

one framed more for a lay person), Moore both invokes and mocks
the authority of experimental “science.” Throughout “Marriage”…
Moore summons the language of experiment, assuming a deperson-
alized tone in order to dispel an idealized vision of heterosexual
union.
(228)

Moore’s putting language to the trial in her documentary collage poem

is experimental, in both the scientific and artistic senses of the term; yet,
she also puts the language of science to the trial as she attempts to com-
prehend the gap between “truth” and “fact.” Moreover, Eve, in Moore’s
portrait, is not only excessively verbal, but she also does not properly
discriminate between situations and degrees of intensity:

equally positive in demanding a commotion

and in stipulating quiet:
“I should like to be alone”;
to which the visitor replies,
“I should like to be alone;
why not be alone together?”
(ll. 28–33)

Though Moore does not specify, the “visitor” is, presumably, Adam,
who, like Eve, seems to be able to move between the ancient and
­contemporary worlds, the mythic and the physical ones (much like her
documentary collage technique allows Moore to do).19 Here, he makes
the proposal to Eve that they join as a couple, and the manner in which it
is proposed can indicate why many critics have taken “Marriage” to be
an anti-marriage poem: “why not be alone together?” The limited view
of such a partnership is continued a few lines down as “this amalgama-
tion which can never be more/ Than an interesting impossibility.”20 The
word “amalgamation,” which has taken on a fairly ­benign connotation
in contemporary usage, has several relevant, and less benign, definitions:

the softening of metals, etc. by union with mercury; the action or

process of combining with mercury; and by extension, the intimate
combination of two metals into an alloy; the action of combining
distinct elements, races, associations, into one uniform whole; a ho-
mogeneous union of what were previously distinct elements, societ-
ies, etc. 21
72  Logical Sentiment
Though Moore’s skepticism concerning marriage is fairly evident in
this line, lurking under the surface in the language are connotations of
white-hot fire, violence, genocide, and cultural annihilation.
The portrait of Adam is similarly slanted. Like Eve, he is portrayed as
physically beautiful, but deeply flawed in other ways:

And he has beauty also;

it’s distressing—the O thou
to whom from whom,
without whom nothing—Adam;
“something feline,
something colubrine”—how true!
a crouching mythological monster
in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,
raw silk—ivory white, snow white,
oyster white and six others—
that paddock full of leopards and giraffes—
long lemon-yellow bodies
sown with trapezoids of blue.
(ll. 60–72)

Adam is beautiful, but his beauty is of a distinctly nonspiritual nature;

rather, it is animalistic and aesthetic. The phrase “something feline,/
something colubrine,” taken from a review of George Santayana’s p ­ oetry
that appeared in The New Republic in 1923, in particular stands out as
a backhanded compliment at best. Cat-like and snake-like, he is both
conventionally feminized and demonized through the connection to the
serpent that Eve had previously been “constrained in speaking of” (l.
60). The source of this documentary citation, from a review of poetry,
anticipates the next series of comparisons, which are to miniature repro-
ductions of animals: “a crouching mythological monster/in that Persian
miniature of emerald mines.” Thus, Moore uses her collage technique to
dismiss Adam as too feminine, too animalistic, and too effete. Like Eve,
though, he has significant verbal abilities:

Alive with words,

vibrating like a cymbal
touched before it has been struck,
he has prophesied correctly—
the industrious waterfall,
“the speedy stream
which violently bears all before it,
at one time silent as the air
and now as powerful as the wind.”
(ll. 73–81)
 Logical Sentiment  73
However, he does not put his abilities to their best use but rather wastes
them on trivialities and banalities:

“Treading chasms
on the uncertain footing of a spear,”
forgetting that there is in woman
a quality of mind
which as an instinctive manifestation
is unsafe,
he goes on speaking
in a formal customary strain,
of “past states, the present state,
seals, promises,
the evil one suffered,
the good one enjoys,
hell, heaven,
everything convenient
to promote one’s joy.”
(ll. 82–96)

Although Adam is “Alive with words, / vibrating like a cymbal / touched

before it has been struck,” and his words have power—the power of
naming—that cause them to adduce their own truth as though they were
prophecies or the “industrious waterfall,” he wastes them. 22 Like Eve,
he produces language prodigiously, but to little effect. Neither commu-
nicates with the other; rather, they fill the spaces around them with the
products of language—written or verbal. This is, in a sense, the oppo-
site of Moore’s practice as a collage poet—rather than producing many
trivial new words, she recites and recontextualizes the words of others
to make her points: nearly one-third of this lengthy poem is made up of
“recycled” language.23 Adam’s attitude toward marriage itself is often
taken to be one of the deciding pieces of evidence in the debate over
whether “Marriage” is anti-marriage:

he stumbles over marriage,

“a very trivial object indeed”
to have destroyed the attitude
in which he stood—
the ease of the philosopher
unfathered by a woman.
(ll. 124–9)

Adam “stumbles over marriage” (one expects to hear “stumbles onto”

or “into marriage”), which is “a very trivial object indeed.”24 To Adam,
marriage is a “stumbling block,” and thus scandalous. 25 To align oneself
74  Logical Sentiment
with a female can only destroy his divinely given philosophical “­ attitude.”
Given the description of Adam’s propensity for serious or considered
thought on other topics, it does not seem that his opinions, ­however
anti-­marriage they might be, would be the ones necessarily to align with
Moore’s own thoughts on the matter. As a serious partner for Eve, he
is a failure. Ignoring Eve’s propensity for “a quality of mind / which as
an instinctive manifestation/ is unsafe,” that is, the danger (and thus,
power) that inheres in her linguistic abilities, he goes on speaking with-
out ­purpose; one could say he fails to put language to trial, as he doesn’t
ask it to do much of anything at all. Thus, his attempts at philosophy will
come to nothing, as he is “unfathered by a woman.” This curious phrase,
which seems to make little logical sense, may simply be a manifestation
of Moore’s word play. It does seem to indicate that Adam, for all his
powers of naming, will fail as a partner to Eve and as a p
­ hilosopher, as he
has no relation to women at all. His desire to “be alone together” betrays
the superficiality of the rapprochement he attempts to initiate with her.26
The poem ends with an equivocal passage, returning to its original set
of “circular” images:

One sees that it is rare—

that striking grasp of opposites
opposed each to the other, not to unity,
which in cycloid inclusiveness
has dwarfed the demonstration
of Columbus with the egg—
a triumph of simplicity—
  [….]
… “I have encountered it
among those unpretentious protégés of wisdom,
where seeming to parade
as the debater and the Roman,
the statesmanship
of an archaic Daniel Webster
persists to their simplicity of temper
as the essence of the matter:
‘Liberty and union
now and forever’;
the Book on the writing-table;
the hand in the breast-pocket.”
(ll. 258–64; 276–87)

In this passage, the narrator moves from a recognition of “that strik-

ing grasp of opposites/ opposed each to the other, not to unity,” which
is “rare” (not in itself a stirring statement on behalf of marriage), to
 Logical Sentiment  75
mention “the demonstration/ of Columbus with the egg” in which
­ olumbus crushed the end of an egg to prove that he could make it
C
stand up on its own, to the final quotation of the poem from the states-
man Daniel Webster: “‘Liberty and union / now and forever.’” Preceded
by a description of “the debater and the Roman,/ the statesmanship/
of an archaic Daniel Webster,” this reference might call in to question
the seriousness with which we are to take this as a stirring description
of marriage. (Charles Berger claims that, “[b]ased on the treatment of
Daniel Webster at the close of ‘Marriage,’ we have some idea of Moore’s
disregard for public speakers” (152).) Taken on its face, though, this
quotation can be read as a perfect summation of what an ideal marriage
should be: the combination of responsibility and freedom, closeness
and separation. However, the original context of the statement, prior
to Moore’s inclusion of it in her collage, is sufficiently well known to
maintain its integrity despite the new surroundings. Webster made this
statement in support of the Fugitive Slave Act, which delayed the onset
of the Civil War, preserving the Union of the North and the South, but
in so doing, supporting slavery. 27 There are three sets of “unions” that
­Webster’s quotation allows to inhabit this passage: the marriage, the
union of the States, and the union of master and slave. Webster’s pres-
ence as the author of this description of the successful union, and the
only partially obscured presence of the governmental and legal unions
of states and slaves, suggests that even those marriages that do succeed
do so at great cost to the participants, and demand great compromises—
in some cases, greater than ever should be made. Most critics have de-
scribed the last lines as a typical wedding photo. I see another possible
interpretation, however, again lurking in the background: the Book and
the hand suggest a courtroom swearing of oaths. Since the hand is in the
breast pocket, it is not on the Bible. The oaths being taken here—echoes
of the “public promises” at the beginning of the poem—are not taken
with honest intentions, or perhaps not at all.
Though marriage may seem a prosaic topic for the modernist long
poem, Moore’s collage technique—accomplished almost entirely through
quotation—carefully brings together all the legal, social, and religious
powers for which marriage acts as a nexus. “Marriage,” thus, becomes
an example of a poem designed to “use other’s words to draw atten-
tion to and validate otherwise unnoticed experience” (Harter 337). Her
testimony to the harm that the universal marriage standard can do to
those who enter into it unwillingly (or even willingly but unwisely, as
was Moore’s view of the marriage of her friends Bryher and ­Robert
McAlmon) is enacted only by putting language—language she has bor-
rowed from sources ancient and modern, strange and familiar, and then
juxtaposed—to the trial, and producing poetry that manages to extract
both truth and fact. Her documentary collage poem produces the evi-
dence for this trial, the testimony meant to provide an answer to versions
76  Logical Sentiment
of the questions with which I began this chapter: who are we, as a soci-
ety, when we effectively require marriage of all? What has the universal
marriage standard done to us all, as individuals living alone and those
attempting to live together? The poem effectively ends with a question
that remains unanswered: is there a way to change marriage so that it is
not akin to slavery?

*****

The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, who was at one time known as the
“poster girl” for Popular Front poetics, has gone through a critical re-
vival, the chief sign of which has been the reprinting of her Collected
Poems. 28 Despite her early mainstream success—Theory of Flight (1935)
was selected by Stephen Vincent Benet for the Yale Younger Poets series
when she was only 22 years old—Rukeyser’s work, in particular her
masterwork, “The Book of the Dead” in U.S. 1 (1938), received strongly
mixed reviews among critics both sympathetic and not to her political
causes even at the moment of its highest currency. Critics on the left
saw the poetry as being too “artistic;” her collage technique was said to
be snobbish and to confuse the more important political issues. On the
other hand, mainstream critics often complained that she had ignored
the lyric gift evidenced in her first book in favor of her leftist politics and
the disjunctive “voice” of collage. This is, in some sense, the paradig-
matic difficulty of the politically engaged collage poet. Perhaps the sign
of Rukeyser’s success as a collage poet is that critics on both sides of the
critical “aisle” complained that she was not receptive enough to their
desires for her poetry; both sides wanted to claim her as their own, and
yet neither was satisfied by her poetic achievement.
Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” is a very strong example of po-
litically motivated documentary collage poetry. In it, she testifies to the
Gauley Tunnel disaster, in which thousands of laborers in West Virginia
were stricken with silicosis due to being compelled (due to lack of other
viable employment opportunities) by Union Carbide to dry-drill silica
without the proper ventilation masks and other safety precautions. The
drilling of the tunnel was started as a federally funded project, but once
miners discovered massive amounts of pure silica in the ore, the focus of
the project became excavating the greatest amount of silica in the least
amount of time. As more and more workers began to fall ill (and even-
tually die) from the disease—which causes extreme shortness of breath
and, as scar tissue develops over the lungs, leads to suffocation—the
company used intimidation, bribery, and extortion in order to silence
the workers who attempted to obtain medical care or legal damages and
to influence the members of the medical profession who might have ex-
posed the situation. Company officials bribed the local undertaker to
change the cause of death on death certificates to tuberculosis, pleurisy,
 Logical Sentiment  77
or other bogus causes; as the majority of these workers were Southern
black migrant workers, the explanation given was that the men died
from causes related to their disreputable lifestyle (the combination of
drinking, gambling outside, and cold weather supposedly caused pneu-
monia). The company relied upon not only racism but also the men’s
lack of local friends or relatives to ensure that no one would mind too
much when they disappeared. The undertaker would then bury their
bodies in mass graves in his mother’s cornfield; these burials occurred
so quickly that those relatives of the deceased who might try to pay their
final respects often arrived at the site too late to do so. The poem also
documents the subsequent congressional investigation into these events,
and the blockage of a bill designed to include silicosis under worker’s
compensation provisions. 29
Unlike Moore’s “Marriage,” where the legal context is implied in the
language and the idea of marriage as a legal institution, much of “The
Book of the Dead” takes place in a specifically legal context: large por-
tions of the poem consist of Rukeyser’s importation of testimony given
by victims of silicosis or their loved ones before various governmental
or legal bodies, including a Congressional subcommittee. Thus, when I
claim that she uses collage as a type of evidence in this poem, this claim
works both literally and metaphorically. Literally, she uses testimony in
her documentary poetry that was given as evidence against the Union
Carbide company, both in civil court cases that were brought against
them, and in the subcommittee hearings, which were held in order to
appropriate funds for further Congressional fact-finding against Union
Carbide. (This was not successful.) Metaphorically, Rukeyser makes her
own case on behalf of the silicosis victims and their families. She rep-
resents them and gives them a voice, using the trial of language to insert
them into history, to fight against the erasure of their sacrifice that Union
Carbide attempted to effect. 30
“The Book of the Dead,” approximately thirty pages long, comprises
twenty sections of various lengths. The middle sections of the book use
varying degrees of documentary collage, and a variety of styles, but can
loosely be categorized as documentary poems, personal monologues, and
lyrical meditations.31 The first and last sections, entitled “The Road”
and “The Book of the Dead,” are both written in free-verse syllabics
with three-line stanzas and without the use of collage techniques; both
use geographic surveys of the land around Gauley Tunnel as a type of
trope to summarize the situation and situate the reader. 32 The other sec-
tions (the eighteen between the first and the last) use a variety of collage
techniques: some contain excerpts of testimony and interviews, while
others use historical materials, song forms, stock market quotations,
and chemical notations. The use of personal testimony of the victims of
silicosis, their family members, and other individuals allows Rukeyser
to render the facts of her collage poem—what happened to the workers
78  Logical Sentiment
and why—as relatively clear, while still maintaining the importance of
the documentary collage technique in terms of its direct presentation of
material. Many of the sections contain direct quotations or near para-
phrases from the work that Rukeyser’s poem shares its title with, the
Egyptian Book of the Dead.33 Rukeyser indicates the sections that she
derives from The Book of the Dead by putting them in italic type, rather
than using quotation marks.
Throughout the poem, the most notable referent is to vision and the
sphere of visuality. Rukeyser, with her Popular Front/WPA connections,
was intimately connected to the burgeoning world of documentary cul-
ture, rising due both to world events and government sponsorship of
a variety of major projects. Her time as an employee of the Graphics
Division of the War Information Board, as well as with Life and other
mainstream magazines, was spent taking part in the creation of pho-
tomontages used for journalistic or investigative purposes; the posters
she helped create for the Graphics Division were intended to spread the
anti-fascist ideals that were, at the time, not at all antithetical to her
left-wing politics. Documentary methods, in both film and photogra-
phy, were often used in order to bring to light some suffering or wrong
against a group unable to speak for itself, as in Walker Evans and James
Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Margaret Bourke White and
Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces. Michael Davidson de-
scribes how many writers on the left, including Rukeyser, were a part
of the new documentary culture that wanted to read American history

as a material record of diverse constituencies. They Must All Be

Represented is both the title of a documentary project and an im-
perative felt by writers of the time to write history from “as many
standpoints as were provided by the witnesses themselves”.
(140)

Though Davidson’s description seems accurate as an overall portrait

of the moment, a reading of “The Book of the Dead” indicates that
­Rukeyser did not see this new impulse toward documentary as being un-
complicatedly positive. As much as she may have felt and acted upon the
representational impulse Davidson describes, the resultant text betrays
some deep misgivings about the execution of this documentary culture,
of which her documentary collage poem was a part.
“The Book of the Dead” was initially planned as a documentary film,
and Rukeyser traveled to the Gauley Tunnel area in order to do research
there along with Nancy Naumberg, who acted as her photographer. The
film project was shelved for a variety of reasons, including a lack of
funding. However, money does not appear to be the only cause for the
film’s failure: the fact that there has never been a version of the poem
with accompanying photographs indicates some fundamental unease on
 Logical Sentiment  79
Rukeyser’s part with modern, technologically advanced techniques of
visuality, despite their abundant utility to the political causes she advo-
cated.34 Not only documentary techniques, but also medical imaging
techniques, most notably x-ray, play an equally important, if equivocal,
role in the analysis of the poem.35 The thematization of visuality—as
opposed to the use of visual techniques, such as the inclusion of pho-
tographs, or images of any kind, along with the text of the poem—is
indicative of this equivocal role that recent technological advances in the
sciences, as well as in entertainment and communications media, had for
the poet. 36 The collage techniques that she utilizes are directed toward
providing her readers with an intense, but controlled, visual experience
without the use of visual aids. Her textual descriptions, combined with
the documentary materials she imports to her collage, are vivid in a way
that provokes a clear mental image of what she is describing. The way
that she moves from scene to scene is often reminiscent of how filmic
cuts provide the viewer with a sense of the whole of their surroundings.
By denying her readers pictorial access to the scenes she describes or the
faces of the witnesses she cites, Rukeyser cuts them off from visually mo-
tivated identification with those witnesses (or from a lack of identifica-
tion on the same basis) as well as from visual pleasure from the scenes.37
As Justin Parks argues, it is the affective susceptibility of the viewers of
photographic images toward reading emotions into a photograph that
may or may not have been there originally that “makes the viewer easy
prey for the photographer, who, through tricks of her trade, manipulates
images to achieve desired effects” (159). In this way, she can more fully
control the associations drawn from her collage technique which itself
provides control (through editorial procedures) of the testimony whose
truth claims she relies upon. This lack of visual identification or pleasure
on the part of the reader puts Rukeyser more firmly in control of possi-
ble reactions to her work, a necessary step in order for her to make as
strong a case as possible on behalf of those who have been wronged by
Union Carbide’s labor practices. In this way, she too uses language to
stage a trial. While documentary photography and other visual imaging
techniques are commonly considered to be purely “factual,” Rukeyser
was well aware of how they could be used to manipulate ideologically
influenced versions of “truth.” Thus, the evidence that she provides to
support her testimony on behalf of the Gauley Tunnel workers does not
include visual images.
This lack of a pictorial aspect to accompany the text is even more
striking with the realization that, unlike Moore’s poetry, the source ma-
terial on which Rukeyser bases her collage is often visual. Although her
work is facilitated by the use of many technologies of visual imaging,
the text itself remains deeply suspicious of those technologies, and even
of the very materials of which they are made. Many lines in the opening
sequences of the poem focus on images of glass, particularly as it relates
80  Logical Sentiment
to the camera lens. For instance, from “The Road,” she describes how
the photographer surveys “the deep country, follows discovery/ viewing
on groundglass an inverted image” (ll. 28–30); or from “Gauley Bridge,”
“Glass, wood, and the naked eye: the movie-house/ closed for the after-
noon frames posters streaked with rain” (ll. 22–3).38 Glass gains sym-
bolic charge in this poem for several reasons: first, it is derived from
silica, the very material that kills the laborers; at the same time, it is a
crucial component of the technologies that enable the witnessing and
documentation of the wrongs done to these workers as the camera and
the x-ray (and eyeglasses and the microscope) would not be possible
without it.39 Or, as Shoshana Weschler posits, “The damage done by the
mining of silica ore could not have been exposed without silicon-based
photomechanical technology and the representational fields it supports”
(228). The very basis for the documentary impulse in the 1930s—the
increasingly affordable access that individual writers and artists had to
such technologies—was founded on the process that caused Rukeyser’s
reason for being at Gauley Tunnel. Historically, glass has represented a
type of unalloyed access to the truth, and what is seen through a glass is
thought to be clear, untainted, and untinted. How can glass represent the
untainted truth when it is already tainted from the beginning? The visual
imaging technologies that utilize glass are found, in the course of the
poem, to present events and situation in a light that is altogether biased.
Moreover, in a poem that is fundamentally born out of the documen-
tary, eyewitness tradition, there begins to develop a suspicion even of
the human eye as a reliable means of deriving the “truth” of a situation.
Davidson argues that

[w]hat links the documentary imperative to acts of testimony is

the fact that eyewitness reports retain some vestige of the unique
­individual; they testify that someone was actually present when
such-and-such happened, and this document is its record.
(149)

Yet, it becomes clear, even in these early passages, that, despite R

­ ukeyser’s
reliance on “eyewitness reports,” she is equally suspicious of them, and
in their ability to distort facts in the guise of reporting knowledge. Thus,
the basis for both “truth” and “fact” is problematized from the initial
section of the poem. With neither of these realms of possible evidence
available for unproblematic use, Rukeyser must find a way to use her
collage technique in order to mine them both for what can be salvaged.
After the implied eyes of the narrator, who surveys the scene of the
landscape for us (and whose vision is not explicitly challenged), we then
see through the eyes of the photographer, “viewing on groundglass an
inverted image.”40 The photographer—who is there in order to help
record the damages done to the workers by industry—cannot, for all
 Logical Sentiment  81
her good intentions, provide an accurate record when the eye is already
tainted by ideology, and when her equipment makes use of the very
material that has caused the deaths they are there to investigate.41 The
other “eyes” in this section are equally engaged in various types of ob-
jectification: avaricious longing for material goods, the imbibing of the
empty visual images of Hollywood, or the sexualized gaze that objecti-
fies women.
Having initiated, in these early sections of the poem, the disruption
of any single viewpoint that could claim to present something like an
accurate representation of the truth, much of the remainder proceeds
by allowing, through documentary collage, the expression of the voices
of Union Carbide’s victims, and those who attempted to represent their
interests: tunnel workers themselves, their relatives and spouses, social
workers, and medical professionals. The representation of the medical
testimony in the poem establishes that visual imaging technology was
essential to the workers’ case, and yet the text (as a representation of
Rukeyser’s testimony on behalf of the workers) favors language over vi-
sual images. Rukeyser seems to argue, through the formal choices she
has made in “The Book of the Dead,” that only language can ­fi nally
bridge the gap between truth and fact, combining the authentic as-
pects of both in testimony; this happens when language is subjected to
a trial, which, in this case, takes place in an explicitly legal context.
One ­important section, entitled “Absalom,” represents the testimony of
Mrs. Jones, who lost her husband and three sons to silicosis. She begins
her tale in a straightforward and matter-of-fact manner:

I first discovered what was killing these men.

I had three sons who worked with their father in the tunnel:
Cecil, aged 23, Owen, aged 21, Shirley, aged 17.
They used to work in a coal mine, not steady work
for the mines were not going much of the time.
A power Co. foreman learned that we made home brew,
he formed a habit of dropping in evenings to drink,
persuading the boys and my husband—
give up their jobs and take this other work.
It would pay them better.
Shirley was my youngest son; the boy.
He went into the tunnel.
(ll. 1–12)

At this point, a seemingly different voice interrupts Mrs. Jones’s testimony:

My heart my mother my heart my mother

My heart my coming into being.
(ll. 13–4)
82  Logical Sentiment
The remainder of “Absalom” follows in this same pattern: the majority
of its lines reads as if it were unexpurgated testimony by Mrs. Jones
herself—the diction is plain, the simple syntax is often broken. There is
little overt sentimentality in the tone here, and no figurative language.
Then, the speaker of the italicized lines interrupts, with language utterly
distinct from the remainder of the poem in diction, syntax, tone, style,
font, and even placement on the page. These italicized lines are those
that Rukeyser has either quoted directly, or borrowed heavily, from the
Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The lines from the Egyptian Book of the Dead stand in stark con-
trast to Mrs. Jones’s testimony, which presents a portrait of a stoical,
long-suffering matriarch who has by now become a somewhat familiar
figure from the documentary culture of the 1930s. Typically, she accepts
the rough circumstances that she is in, making the best of her and her
family’s situation. The speaker of the italicized lines, on the contrary,
says things like,

I have gained mastery over my heart

I have gained mastery over my two hands
I have gained mastery over the waters
I have gained mastery over the river.
(ll. 49–52)

These sections have been read as representing a type of idealized,

mythic, nurturing mother figure, one who regains the power that has
been ­unjustly taken from her by the male, mercenary forces of capital-
ism in order to avenge their wrong against both her son and the earth it-
self. The power over both self and the outside world represented by this
speaker seemingly has nothing to do with the situation as represented
by Mrs. Jones’s testimony. The key term in these lines is ­“mastery.” The
power represented by these lines cannot be reconciled with Mrs. Jones’s
situation; indeed, it is hardly likely that any living person could repre-
sent themselves as having this type of control over their environment.
It seems to me much more likely that, as Tim Dayton has argued, the
speaker of these lines is Mrs. Jones’s dead son, Shirley, who speaks
these lines

just as a dead man equipped with the Egyptian Book of the Dead
would recite his prayers. Shirley “shall journey over the earth among
the living” through his mother, who becomes the agent of both his
birth and his rebirth.
(50)

However, by the end of the section, when Mrs. Jones says, “He shall
not be diminished, never; / I shall give a mouth to my son,” Rukeyser’s
 Logical Sentiment  83
documentary collage technique—combining Mrs. Jones’s testimony
with the quotations from the Egyptian Book of the Dead—permits
the figure of Mrs. Jones to incorporate his power and his need to be
recalled to history into herself; she will speak for him. Unable to save
her son’s life, she is determined to proselytize his story to the world
and to make him a part of history. In the process, she strives to make
right the wrongs that have been done to him, to her family, and to
all other families like theirs. Mrs. Jones’s testimony for her son is a
part of Rukeyser’s larger aim, throughout the poem, to redirect “our
­attention… toward the transitional figures of exploited laborers, those
whose lives capitalism negligently sacrifices in building its monolithic
technology” (Slater 768).
The composite figure that she uses to effect this redirection is, of
course, not real. She is a product of Rukeyser’s documentary collage
techniques, which weave together testimony from various sources in or-
der to forward the strongest possible case, and to make each character
say exactly what she wants them to say. The testimony in “Absalom”
is a combination of the testimony given by Mrs. Jones herself, by the
social worker Philipa Allen (who also has her own monologue section
in “The Book of the Dead,”), and by Charles Jones, her husband, prior
to his death.42 Her collage techniques in this section, and in others,
allow her to shore up her case on the part of those disenfranchised by
their economic status; she can make their voices heard by presenting
their case in the best possible light, and in the most persuasive manner.
Walter Kalaidjian argues that by

[c]utting, splicing, and editing her documented accounts with poetic

images, she achieves a shocking exposé of the ensemble of profes-
sional, corporate, and state discourses that together have served his-
torically to protect the interests of capital before labor. Moreover,
the gaps, breaks and lacunae that punctuate the poet’s presentation
of documentary reportage permit her audience to collaborate in pro-
ducing the poem’s interpretive meaning.
(172)

While I concur with his analysis of her technique, I do not find that
Rukeyser intends to allow her readers to “collaborate in producing the
poem’s interpretive meaning.” Rather, she gives the appearance of doing
so while using collage techniques—such as the insertion of the italicized
lines of “Absalom”—to direct their responses. Part of her effort to do so
includes the expansion of the documentary context for the poem; here,
she includes the Biblical story (from the book of Samuel) for which the
poem is named, that of Absalom, son of David. Rukeyser’s use of the
Absalom story has little to do with its content (Absalom is a rebellious
son who betrays his father), but rather, Rukeyser
84  Logical Sentiment
carr[ies] over the sense that the son whose death is being lamented
has been wronged, and that the son is righteous. This sense of righ-
teousness of the deceased connects the Old Testament story with the
Egyptian Book of the Dead in Rukeyser’s poem.
(Dayton 48)

The Old Testament context for this part of her documentary collage
emphasizes the righteousness of the cause, not only of the Jones ­family,
but of all the workers, who are implicitly compared to the Jewish slaves
of Egypt, slaves whose work, as Avery Slater recalls, built the civilization
that produced the Egyptian Book of the Dead (774). Her use of these
documentary collage practices accomplishes her goal of making known
the plight of Gauley Tunnel’s workers and their families, while simulta-
neously eliding how carefully she controls not only the amount of infor-
mation her readers are given, but the range of possible reactions to it.
The lengths to which Rukeyser goes in order to control her poetry’s
documents reflect her relationship to the authority of the discourses
from which she borrows—technological, scientific, and legal. In the sec-
tion “The Disease,” Rukeyser cites a description of the x-rays of laborers
with silicosis that both reinforces the medical authority of the doctor
who reads it and denies her own readers’ desire for visual confirmation
of the external description. “The Disease” opens with a medical descrip-
tion of several x-rays that grows increasingly terse as it progresses:

This is a lung disease. Silicate dust makes it.

The dust causing the growth of

This is the X-ray picture taken last April.

I would point out to you; these are the ribs;
this is the region of the breastbone;
this is the heart (a wide white shadow filled with blood).
In here of course is the swallowing tube, esophagus.
The windpipe. Spaces between the lungs.
Between the ribs?
Between the ribs. These are the collar bones.
Now, this lung’s mottled, beginning, in these areas.
You’d say a snowstorm had struck the fellow’s lungs.
About alike, that side and this side, top and bottom.
The first stage in this period in this case.
Let us have a second.
Come to the window again. Here is the heart.
More numerous nodules, thicker, see, in the upper lobes.
You will notice the increase: here, streaked fibrous tissue—
 Logical Sentiment  85
Indicating?
That indicates the progress in ten months’ time.
And now, this year—short breathing, solid scars
Even over the ribs, thick on both sides.
Blood vessels shut. Model conglomeration.
What stage?
Third stage. Each time I place my pencil point:
There and there and there, there, there.

(“The Disease,” ll. 1–26)

This congressional testimony by a specialist in diseases of the lung pro-

vides narration to describe a scene to which we, as readers, are not privy.
As he reads the x-ray for the members of congress—“these are the ribs; /
this is the region of the breastbone;/ this is the heart (a wide white shadow
filled with blood). / In here of course is the swallowing tube, esophagus. /
The windpipe. Spaces between the lungs.”—the doctor maintains his sense
of medical authority: he is the expert who can interpret the image for his
audience. He can transform facts (the x-ray images) into truth (his inter-
pretations of them as diagnosis). His initial lines seem implausibly poetic
in places (“this is the heart (a wide white shadow filled with blood”); yet,
by the end of the section, the linguistic rendering of the image lapses into
pure deixis, losing sense when presented on the page without visual refer-
ent (“There and there and there, there, there.”). Language is again put to
trial in this scene, but it fails to produce decisive testimony for the laborers.
Rukeyser uses documentary collage in order to exemplify the way in
which the visual images of new technologies can be used both to em-
power the disenfranchised and to maintain the position of the already
powerful. These images can surely be used—as they are here, and as
Mrs. Jones testifies—to prove the existence of silicosis in the laborers’
lungs. But this proof is only available to those with the means to obtain
an x-ray picture and to pay a qualified interpreter, one whose qualifica-
tions will be validated by the court. David Kadlec describes how

the state- and corporate-sponsored medical imaging techniques that

exposed and publicized industrial abuses were themselves being used
on a mass scale to “survey” and “manage” “large populations”….
Among these populations was a newly identified body of silicotic
miners and foundry workers. This lingering constituency was be-
lieved to number between 100,000 and 500,000 nationwide, and its
members represented potential financial liabilities to companies that
neglected to screen them from hire
(27–8)
86  Logical Sentiment
Kadlec’s description of the fallout of the Gauley Tunnel project aptly
points to the fact that it has been described in a somewhat misleading
way: often called a “tragedy,” a “disaster,” or an “accident,” it was more
like a symptom or a side effect of a conscious choice by Union Carbide
to pursue a particular business practice, one that was both profitable (for
them) and deadly (for their workers). Thus, the company was, to some
degree, prepared for the outcome of their choice: the deaths of at least
25% of their workforce. In “Absalom,” it becomes clear how they have
prevented the workers and their families from most forms of recourse:
Mrs. Jones has no way to file a complaint against Union Carbide until
she could persuade a doctor to work with her. The existence of this tech-
nology of visual imaging is thus of no use to those without the practical
means that provide access to it—and of course, if a victim had the means
to pay for medical care, it is unlikely that he would have agreed to take
the job that necessitated this medical care in the first place. The over-
turning of one form of authority and logic, that of big business, can only
be accomplished via the cooperation of another, the medical community,
and, finally, the federal government. Rukeyser, like Moore, maintains a
critical distance from the testimony she produces in her poetry. Though
her documentary sources—the words of the victims and of their family
members—are sometimes saturated with affect, the poet does not al-
low their emotive truth to penetrate the documentary collage she uses
in order to present on their behalf. This critical distancing is a part of
what Peter Middleton describes as her poetry’s “commitment to a more
scientific understanding of society and its politics” (129). Its purpose is
equally, though, to enable her testimony on their behalf to work in the
same register as those forms of authority to which she must eventually
make her claims: the federal government.
In the poem, governmental authority is treated equivocally, depend-
ing upon whose benefit that authority promotes: business or labor. The
responsibility that Rukeyser feels toward the workers of Gauley Tunnel
causes her to turn both toward the documentary evidence she gathers
and toward “other institutional contexts through which the orders of
meaning are authorized” in order to marshal support on their behalf
(Wood 207). The congressional subcommittee conducting the initial in-
vestigation is treated quite differently from the general Congress, which
blocked a bill that would have provided worker’s compensation for the
laborers diagnosed with silicosis. Rukeyser’s collage technique enables
the congressman who proposes the bill to give a speech that is both he-
roic and poetically lyrical:

This is the gentleman from Montana.

—I’m a child, I’m leaning from a bedroom window,
clipping the rose that climbs upon the wall,
the tea roses, and the red roses,
 Logical Sentiment  87
one for a wound, another for disease,
remembrance for strikers. I was five, going on six,
my father on strike at the Anaconda mine;
they broke the Socialist mayor we had in Butte,
the sheriff (friendly), found their judge. Strike-broke.
Shot father. He died: wounds and his disease.
My father had silicosis.
Copper contains it, we find it in limestone,
Sand quarries, sandstone, potteries, founderies,
Granite, abrasives, blasting; many kinds of grinding,
Plate, mining, and glass.
Widespread in trade, widespread in space!
Butte, Montana; Joplin, Missouri; the New York tunnels,
The Catskill Aqueduct. In over thirty States.
A disease worse than consumption.
Only eleven States have laws.
There are today one million potential victims.
500,000 Americans have silicosis now.
These are the proportions of war.
(“The Disease: After-Effects,” ll. 16–38)

This solitary congressional representative (who represents Vito Mar-

cantonio of New York) attempts a two-pronged attack. He uses per-
sonal memory and experience (the stories of his father) as well as the
more traditional fodder of legislation to appeal to the greater good and
to avoid the possible devastation that the disease could cause nation-
wide if not checked. Rukeyser’s manipulation of his testimony is, in
some sense, not formally different from that of Mrs. Jones or any of the
other individuals who are given voice through her collage—he speaks
plainly of his family and his experiences, and relays the facts in simple
declarative sentences. What is unusual is his use of the figure of the rose
as a symbol both of his father’s spilled blood and of his act of remem-
brance. The rose is a traditional poetic symbol, and not one to which
most of the speakers in this text would typically have recourse. This
figure marks his difference as a speaker, in terms of both his class posi-
tion, in that he is obviously more educated than most of the others, and
his audience. While Rukeyser’s collage presents his speech on an equal
footing with those of the other speakers, he requires far less of her help.
Speaking before Congress, he is guaranteed an audience and his speech
will automatically become a part of the congressional record. Yet, not
even this lyrically powerful speech from a speaker in his class position
can ensure that the cause of the laborers will ultimately be given voice
under the law.
88  Logical Sentiment
At the end of the section, there is a blunt, “Bill blocked; investiga-
tion blocked”: Rukeyser’s collage technique here censors the debate
for or against the bill, as well as any speeches given on the side of the
opposition. She elides their words and substitutes a blunt and sudden
representation of their ultimate outcome, a legal blockage that paral-
lels the blockage of the workers’ lungs. Rukeyser’s point, however, is
that for all the beauty and power of the speeches she has documented
in her text, for all her efforts to give voice to those who do not have
one, the recording of their words can do little against the brute power
of the ­institutionally powerful. Or, as Leonard Scajaj puts it, “Justice
for the dead West ­Virginia mine workers can appear for Rukeyser only
as a function of witnessing, recording the truth, and completing the aes-
thetic design of the poem…” (5). Her silencing of the opposition to the
silicosis bill creates a kind of reversal of what has happened in ­Congress
(“Bill blocked, investigation blocked”), but it also does not change the
facts: business was able to force the defeat of the bill, and labor still
does not have a voice that will be heard. Despite Mrs. Jones’s assertion
that she will “give a mouth” to her son, and despite Rukeyser’s active
documentary intervention into her testimony, she and others like her are
not compensated and the recording of their voices in an aesthetic text is
little comfort when one must, as Mrs. Jones does, survive on $2 a week.
The upsurge in interest in Rukeyser’s work has largely moved in the
direction of reclaiming her as the politically active, feminist poet she
was. However, many critics also want to see “Book of the Dead” as a
text of feminist redemption that marshals the power of myth and nature
to overcome the institutionalized powers of business and government.43
While there are certainly passages in the text that would seem to sup-
port this conclusion, particularly in the sections “The Dam,” “The Book
of the Dead,” and those already cited in “Absalom,” Rukeyser never
­forgets—or lets her audience forget—that given the current structure,
those in power tend to remain in power no matter what poets do. In the
final section, “The Book of the Dead,” she asks a series of instructive
(if rhetorical) questions:

What one word must never be said?

Dead, and these men fight off our dying,
cough in the theatres of war.
What two things shall never be seen?
They: what they did. Enemy: what we mean.
This is a nation’s scene and halfway house.
What three things can never be done?
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.
The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain.
(“The Book of the Dead,” ll. 7–15)
 Logical Sentiment  89
The rhymes in this section are unusual in the poem: in the first stanza,
said/dead; in the second, seen/mean/scene; in the third, the slant rhyme,
done/alone. The final word of the poem, “plain,” though it does not have
a rhyme in the stanza, insistently recalls both “pain,” and “pane”: the
pain of the dead and dying; the pane of glass that has already appeared
earlier in the line (“the hills of glass”), in reference to the landscape of
West Virginia. These formal qualities of the section—the rhymes, al-
lusions, and the rhythmic insistency—point toward the ultimate pur-
pose of the section, and, indeed, the work as a whole; it is a work of
remembrance, one intended to record that which must not be forgot-
ten. Though Rukeyser envisions here that her act of remembrance might
serve some future purpose (which seems clear from the imperative with
which these commands are given), a vision of what that would be—a
description of what our national scene would be when we are out of the
“halfway house” –does not materialize. Rukeyser’s use of the discourses
of science “balances protest and disclosure without turning the laborers
into passive victims. They remain ‘workers’ even in disease and death”
(Duncan, “All Power” 559). Her efforts to give testimony on behalf of
the workers without silencing their own voices are effective but cannot
change the ultimate outcome of the confluence of big business and gov-
ernment. The power of the memories of those who have gone before,
who “fight off our dying,” is put forth as a continued cause for efforts
on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves, however meager the
compensation in the current “nation’s scene” may be.
Her two penultimate lines (“What three things can never be done?/
Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone.”) instruct her readers that despite our
lack of knowledge as to what the future world may look like or be con-
stituted by, it will come, and that, through it, the current struggles and
sacrifices will become an integral part of history. Moore’s poem, in con-
trast, does not betray any particular hope for future change. The tone of
“Marriage” is consistently difficult to interpret, but much of it could be
described as “satiric” in nature, though it does not share the historical
nostalgia that much satire hides, as the problem she identifies is placed
at a moment before recorded (fact-based) history. While Rukeyser’s ini-
tial envisioned solution to the problem she articulates fails, and the solu-
tion that inheres in the final coda is not fully articulated, Moore’s poem
does not offer any solution at all; this may be because the problem she
addresses—the standard of universal marriage—is not one of law, cul-
ture, or religion, but a powerful mixture of all three that has infiltrated
social conventions and customs. The ultimate solution to this problem,
which is not present in the poem, would likely be just as ­radical as the
one Rukeyser (implicitly) proposes, and just as unimaginable: an en-
tirely new way of imagining social, economic, and sexual relations.
This feat of the imagination is not one that either poet, despite their
radical formal innovations, can yet accomplish. Both texts, rather, ask
90  Logical Sentiment
(to return to the questions with which I began), who are we (as a nation,
as the common group of humanity) when we ignore the suffering of so
many in favor of the interests of socially or financially entrenched insti-
tutions? And, finally, what does it mean not to look upon such suffering
but rather to understand it through language, language that has been
put to a trial?

Notes
1 Religious belief and mythology can also hold their own type of truth values,
which have little to do with facts or scientific inquiry.
2 The word “trial” has many relevant definitions in the OED:
1 Law. The examination and determination of a cause by a judicial tribu-
nal; determination of the guilt or innocence of an accused person by a
court.
2 The determination of a person’s guilt or innocence, or the righteousness
of his cause, by a combat between the accuser and the accused (trial by
battle, by (single) combat, by wager of battle, by the sword); ‘a combat
decisive of the merits of a cause’.…
3 Inquiry or investigation in order to ascertain something; examination,
elucidation. to take (get) trial, to make inquiry. Sc. Obs.
4 a Action, method, or treatment adopted in order to ascertain the result;
investigation by means of experience; experiment.
b T he result ascertained by testing; effect; efficacy. (Cf. PROOF n.  7.)
Obs. rare.
5 transf. Evidence, proof. Obs.
6 a A testing of qualifications, attainments, or progress; examination.
7 The fact of undergoing or experiencing; experience. to have (or make)
trial of, to experience. Obs.
8 That which puts one to the test; esp. a painful test of one’s endurance,
patience, or faith; hence, affliction, trouble, misfortune (Cf. 2b.).
3 Via the 6th Amendment, all citizens have a right to trial by jury when ac-
cused of a felony.
4 This is a change in poetics since the twentieth century. Traditionally, poets
claimed many other social functions for poetry, including the recording of
facts, in the epic form.
5 It is a critical misperception that all of Moore’s citations are from the banal
materials of everyday life—advertisements, pamphlets, and the like. She is
just as likely to use citations from very learned—if arcane and i­diosyncratic—
texts. However, these sources are much less likely to be overtly identifiable
as such (as compared to those used by other modernist writers), and thus,
their import has little to do with the identity of the author. As Steinman has
claimed, in her “Marianne Moore and the Literary Tradition,”
In her published collections of poetry, Moore always included notes to
her poems that provide readers with her polyglot and often unscholarly
sources, a mark of her democratization of Eliot’s ideas about the po-
et’s relationship to culture and, indeed, a redefinition of culture itself.
Moreover, Moore’s poems are ‘ecstatic’ in that they decontextualize or
temporarily recontextualize what they contain; everything, in short, is
out of place.
(108)
 Logical Sentiment  91
6 This information is derived from Moore’s own notes in Complete Poems, as
well as from Charles Molesworth’s biography of her.
7 All poems are quoted from Complete Poems.
8 This banality of technological advancement is only exponentially more so
for our current moment (i.e. knowing the time as determined by satellites
any time one wishes to look at a smart phone).
9 One precedent for this position is John Keats’s “negative capability,” the idea
that poets can allow certain conflicts to remain undecided and unresolved.
10 This definition is derived from the OED. It is true that much of Moore’s
poetic output also conforms to the more common poetic associations with
the term “experimental.”
11 Although the idea of the poet’s “reputation” may seem a quaint notion, the
negative examples of Loy and the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
were easily accessible to Moore at this moment. Loy’s solution to the prob-
lem of female reputation was the compulsory surgical destruction of virgin-
ity, while the Baroness’s public persona (outside of any actions she may have
taken) was quite scandalous. There have been a number of critical writings
on Moore’s sense of her reputation and public persona during her late career,
as it entered its stage of literary celebrity. See Gregory, “Marriane Moore’s
‘Blue Bug’: A Dialogic Ode on Celebrity, Race, Gender, and Age” and “‘Still
Leafing’: Celebrity, Confession, Marriane Moore’s ‘The Camperdown Elm’
and the Scandal of Age,” and Benjamin Kahan, “‘The Viper’s Traffic-Knot’:
Celibacy and Queerness in the ‘Late’ Marianne Moore.”
12 It is certainly possible to argue that as an unmarried woman from a family
of unhappy or difficult marriages, Moore did represent one of those whom
the universal marriage standard has harmed. Several critics have begun to
unearth more personal connections with the writing of the poem. Patricia
Willis, David Bergman, and Bethany Hicok all claim that the poem is a
direct response to Bryher’s hasty and unwise (in Moore’s mind) marriage
to Robert McAlmon. Linda Leavell, on the other hand, has argued that the
poem was written in response to the then still married Scofield Thayer’s
proposal of marriage to Moore. Both these interpretations add a layer of
“interestedness” to Moore’s “disinterested” persona, and yet, I would argue,
neither removes the overall thrust of the poem, as an attempt to put marriage
itself (as a social institution) to the trial and to use a disinterested persona
to do so. Which is to say, even if Moore had a personal investment in her
critique of marriage, her interest in the topic is hardly limited to the way in
which it affects her and her friends.
13 The original quotation reads as such:
I have taken all knowledge to be my province and if I could purge it of
two sorts of errors, whereof the one with frivolous disputation, confu-
tations and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and circular
traditions and impostures hath committed so many spoils, I hope I shall
bring in industrious observations.
The original quotation could seemingly apply to Moore herself as well as
St. ­Francis, as her intellectual interests seemed to take knowledge from all fields
to be a part of her domain. Much of the information here is derived from the
discussion in Margaret Holley’s Marianne Moore: A Study in Voice and Value.
14 Moore maintained, within her close family circle, an idealized discourse
on the state of “bachelorhood,” from referring to herself as a “bachelor” to
longing for the state of “bachelorhood” as an acceptable one for a woman
(as opposed to that of the “spinster”). The possibility of creating the status
of the female bachelor may fill in the third position alluded to by Ellen Levy
92  Logical Sentiment
when she writes, “This [idea that ‘criminal ingenuity’ can allow one to stand
outside the idea of ‘marriage’] presumes, however, that there is an outside to
‘this institution,’ that one may be neither Adam nor Eve, but a third, name-
less thing…” (41).
15 On the other hand, many of the famous names of English literature are
alluded to in the poem, but never, or hardly, by name. The obvious one is
Milton, whose Paradise Lost inspired this response, at least in the narrative
aspect of the poem. Shakespeare, who is mentioned by name once, plays a
much larger role than she acknowledges.
16 This was the text that Moore was to devote most of her late career to trans-
lating into English. Her quotation from a different (presumably inadequate)
translation in this poem surely says something about how seriously we are to
take these lines.
17 Sexuality is never named specifically in the poem, though there are allusions
to it (“Unhelpful hymen”). R. P. Blackmur, in his essay “The Method of Mari-
anne Moore,” writes that in “Marriage,” there is
no element of sex or lust… There is no sex anywhere in her poetry.
No poet has been more chaste; but it is not the chastity that arises by
­awareness—healthy or morbid—of the flesh, it is a special chastity aside
from the flesh—a purity by birth and of the void.
(122)
Quoted from Gregory, The Critical Response to Marianne Moore. For the
way in which Moore’s interest in biology veered into the 1920s enthusi-
asm for eugenics, see David Kadlec, “Marianne Moore, Immigration, and
Eugenics.”
18 “Statements that took my fancy which I tried to arrange plausibly” (CP 271).
19 Hicok claims through Bergman that the “visitor” could just as easily be
a woman and be Moore’s guarded “coming out” as a homosexual. This
position makes several textual presumptions: 1) that the speaker of the
poem is a woman; 2) that that woman is Moore; 3) that a female speaker’s
recognition of another woman’s beauty is tantamount to an admission of
­homosexuality. There’s no clear textual evidence to indicate that the po-
em’s speaker is either female or male; however since Adam is the only other
named character to interact with Eve in the poem, the presumption that he
is the speaker of these specific lines seems more warranted. Moreover, even
if the speaker is presumed to be female, moving from that position to one in
which that speaker is Moore is a large critical leap to make, given Moore’s
general reticence about placing herself (in any obviously biographical way)
into her own writing.
0 The majority of Moore’s critics from the 1980s onward interpret “Mar-
2
riage” as anti-marriage. According to Elisabeth Joyce,
A careful analysis of the notebook [Moore’s reading notebook at the
Rosenbach Museum and library] suggests that a paradoxical doubleness
characterizes her collage techniques. Her revisions of her own words tend
to mute her disapproval of marital conventions, while at the same time
her revisions of quotations drawn from other sources tend to sharpen her
critical stance toward marriage…. These quotations suggest that if one
of the roles of the poem is merely to define marriage, Moore’s purpose
equally is to undermine it.
(71–2)
On the other hand, Darlene Erikson has described “Marriage” as “a con-
versation, a comprehensive dialectic based upon some of the greatest myths,
 Logical Sentiment  93
motifs, symbols, visions, and commentaries on the subject of marriage. It
passes no judgment, solves no problems” (103). While this description is
closer to my own view, I don’t fully agree that Moore does not aim to pass
judgment or solve a problem, even if that judgment or solution is the one that
is only reached in the process of reading the poem itself.
21 All definitions are derived from the OED.
22 The quotation “the speedy stream/ which violently bears all before it,/ at
one time silent as the air/ and now as powerful as the wind,” is an unat-
tributed one from Richard Baxter’s The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, a 1650
Calvinist text that described the path to heaven. Baxter’s words are: “the
speedy stream and waterfall which violently bears all before it.” The original
quotation did not refer to marriage in any way.
23 In this way, Moore can be seen as a very early predecessor of the textual
practices of the conceptual writers.
24 This quotation is from William Godwin, free love philosopher. According to
Joyce,
To Godwin, one recalls marriage is a silly institution, a “method for a
thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each
other for a few times and under circumstances full of delusion, and then
to vow eternal attachment.” Godwin believed that marriage should be
abolished or at least rendered readily dissolvable. Moore’s inclusion of
his opinions of marriage in her description of that “First Marriage” thus
undercuts any serious thoughts Adam might have entertained about the
institution.
(76)
25 Scandal: Something that hinders reception of the faith or obedience to the
Divine law; an occasion of unbelief or moral lapse; a stumbling -block.
­Derived from the OED.
26 Many critics have speculated on the questions of whether “Marriage” (and
therefore Moore) is pro- or anti-marriage, and whether Moore can be con-
sidered a feminist in the contemporary sense of the term. It seems unlikely
that one could fully align Moore’s political views with contemporary fem-
inism, as she and her family were political conservatives who supported
Hoover against Roosevelt. (Moore and her mother were involved in the suf-
fragist movement in the 1920s. In that sense, she was a “feminist” as the
word was used at the time.) Whatever her particular views may have been
on issues of feminism as we now know them, she could not fail to notice
the economic and personal imbalances of power in the marriages she was
able to observe, particularly those in her own immediate family (“experi-
ence attests/­that men have power/and sometimes one is made to feel it”); nor
could she overlook that a successful marriage might be a beautiful thing but
also a rare one, and one that demanded harsh sacrifices on the part of those
involved.
27 The advent—and ubiquity—of the Internet, in the years since Moore wrote,
has given new life to old and obscure textual quotations, as their context can
be resurrected in a fraction of a second.
28 The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser was re-released on 1 May 2005.
Rukeyser was literally a “poster girl” in that she worked for the Graphics
Workshop of the Office of War Information during World War II. This po-
sition, and some of her “public” poetry published during the War, caused
her to be held up for public ridicule by the three male editors of Partisan
Review. Their actions then, in turn, began a flurry of letters back and forth,
many of which were published in the journal. This incident, which exposes
94  Logical Sentiment
the latent sexism and homophobia that the PR editors display in their com-
ments on Rukeyser, is given illuminating treatment by James Brock in “The
Perils of a ‘Poster Girl’: Muriel Rukeyser, Partisan Review, and ‘Wake
Island.’”
29 The background story here can largely be gleaned from the poem itself.
Similar versions of the story are told in Kadlec, Thurston, Kalaidjian, and
Davidson.
0 Writing about the relationship among the poet, the poem, and the reader,
3
Rukeyser has said,
At this point I should like to use another word: “audience” or “reader”
or “listener” seems inadequate. I suggest that old word “witness,” which
includes the act of seeing or knowing by personal experience, as well as
the act of giving evidence. The overtone of responsibility in this word is
not present in the others; and the tension of the law makes a climate here
which is that climate of excitement and revelation giving air to the work
of art, announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work
is being done on the self.
(Life of Poetry 175)
Ben Doheney’s Crisis and the US Avant-Garde claim that Rukeyser based
her career on a “poetics of witness” and that she believed that “the po-
et’s central task” was “testimony” (49). Likewise, John Lowney’s History,
Memory and the American Left treats the topic of Rukeyser’s religious sense
of witnessing extensively.
31 Tim Dayton’s Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead uses a similar classifica-
tion for the work.
32 The section surveying the local geography is indebted to the WPA supported
book entitled U.S. 1: Maine to Florida, from which she took the title to her
book as well.
33 From The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani:
The earliest inscribed monuments and human remains found in Egypt
prove that the ancient Egyptians took the utmost care to preserve the
bodies of their dead by various processes of embalming. The deposit
of the body in the tomb was accompanied by ceremonies of a sym-
bolic nature, in the course of which certain compositions comprising
prayers, short litanies, etc., having reference to the future life, were
recited or chanted by priests and relatives on behalf of the dead. The
greatest importance was attached to such compositions, in the belief
that their recital would secure for the dead an unhindered passage to
God in the next world, would enable him to overcome the opposition
of all ghostly foes, would endow his body in the tomb with power
to resist corruption, and would ensure him a new life in a glorified
body in heaven…. Side by side, however, with this ritual there seems
to have existed another and larger work, which was divided into an
indefinite number of sections or chapters comprising chiefly prayers,
and which dealt on a larger scale with the welfare of the departed in
the next world, and described the state of existence therein and the
dangers which must be passed successfully before it could be reached,
and was founded generally on the religious dogmas and mythology of
the Egyptians.
(Budge x–xi)
34 Lobo claims that Rukeyser continued attempting (unsuccessfully) to turn
“The Book of the Dead” into a film after its initial failure of funds.
 Logical Sentiment  95
35 Kadlec covers x-rays in Rukeyser’s work thoroughly:
Despite growing concerns for a nationwide epidemic of industrial dust
disease, bills to add silicosis coverage to worker’s compensation met with
bipartisan opposition in the mid- to late 1930s. Rukeyser charts this leg-
islative failure in “The Book of the Dead” by suggesting that, while the
new medical gaze had the power to enlighten and transform society, its
emancipatory potential lay snagged in the gap between diagnosis and
cure…. In this sense, the reformist objectives of New Deal documentaries
dimmed the light that they shed on the national body’s interior.
(27)
36 In my use of the word “visual” here, I do not intend to include the graphic
elements of the text—something that collage often contributes to a work.
37 There has been a critical discussion over Rukeyser’s treatment of race in this
respect. In the section entitled “George Robinson,” Rukeyser transforms the
man’s testimony into a blues form, thus emphasizing his racially identified
cultural background. (She misspells his name—Robison—as “Robinson.”)
However, she also changes the story he tells about the prevalence of the silica
dust, switching the dust from black to white. There are several possible mo-
tives behind this transformation: it creates a more arresting visual image; it
fits better with the rest of Robison’s description of the trees as being turned
a dazzling white from the silica; by having both men in Robison’s hypothet-
ical description turn white instead of black, it more easily crosses a line of
cross-racial identification for most liberal or left-wing whites (the potential
audience Rukeyser might hope to influence with her work). This issue is
also relevant to a consideration of the policy of the Communist Party with
regard to black Americans: at that time, the Party favored emphasizing the
commonalities of the working class over any particular emphasis on race.
Lowney claims,
Most significant and often understated in readings of Book of the
Dead, Rukeyser foregrounds the racial politics informing the cultural
­memory—and amnesia—of Gauley Bridge, where the majority of mine
workers were black migrant laborers. She does so not only by contrast-
ing the stories and testimony of black workers and their families with
more official versions of their demise but also through the metaphor of
­whiteness—the “white glass” of silica.
(History 35)
38 Other lines from “Gauley Bridge” that contain similar references include the
following: ll. 1–2, 8, 9–12, 13, 17–8, 19, 28–30, 31–3. All references to the
poem are from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser.
39 See discussion of glass in Kalaidjian and Kadlec.
40 This “inverted image” is widely taken by critics to be Marx’s “camera ob-
scura,” the twisted view of the world that commodity fetishism causes in
which labor is alienated from its products.
41 The question of the eye being “tainted by ideology” is a complicated one
due to the constitution of Rukeyser’s potential audience for this work. The
­Popular Front’s mission was, in some sense, to reach those laborers whom
they viewed as being ideologically neutral, those seen as having no fixed
position with respect to most political issues, having thus far failed to un-
derstand what “should” be their own inherent class-based loyalties. Works
such as Rukeyser’s would theoretically be designed to reach such an audi-
ence. In reality, it seems that her audience would most likely be constituted
by those who, much like the author, were middle- or upper-class, white,
96  Logical Sentiment
well-­educated liberals. The author is unlikely to view her own eye as being
already ideologically “tainted”—as most individuals fail to see their own be-
liefs as ideological in nature—however, the natural conclusion of her writing
on this dilemma would lead one to this opinion.
42 Significantly, Allen is the person who spoke the first line of Mrs. Jones’s
testimony: “I first discovered what was killing these men.”
43 For example, see Coco Owens, “Mythotropism: A Psychology of Writing
(to) Myth.” Owens claims that Rukeyser’s use of myth is based on a “love of
justice” (18).
3 A Private Public Sphere

After World War II, an ideal of suburban family life arose in the United
States that narrativized the home as an oasis of pleasure apart from the
“real” world of work, politics, and social life. This ideal represented
the highpoint of a transition which began in the eighteenth century: the
dismantling of the integral agrarian household in favor of the “sepa-
rate spheres” model, where men performed paid labor “at work” while
women performed unpaid labor in the home. This transformative shift
to the conventional vision of suburban-centered family life can be un-
derstood to constitute contemporary notions of the “self” as well as
the idea of “the public” in the sense of “public opinion.” As the seat of
“private” life, the home became the place from where one’s “authentic,”
private self emanated. In the set of stories that get told about contempo-
rary society, this is the origin point of what has become known as the
“traditional family.” Yet, beginning in 1951, the poet Robert Duncan
and the artist Jess developed a starkly different vision of home life that
evolved from the ideal of the home as the center of all life, both private
and ­public. ­Rejecting—perhaps, as a gay couple, out of necessity—the
separate spheres model and its idealization through containment culture,
­Duncan and Jess instead sought to integrate public and private within
the ­household. For Duncan and Jess, the home is precisely not an oasis
free from politics or controversy. If the notion of the public sphere in-
troduced by social philosopher Jürgen Habermas is predicated on the
marking-off of the home world from the state, the economy, and the
public sphere, ­Duncan and Jess’s household exemplified its radical trans-
formation into the central node of those concerns as well as those of the
intimate relations of love, sexuality, and care. They established a private
public sphere in which their home became the locus from where all as-
pects of life emanate, a model of home life standing in direct opposition
to the story about the home told by this Cold War suburban ideal.
Taking Duncan and Jess’s home as exemplary of a private public
sphere, this chapter will analyze collage texts by both artists that use jux-
taposition in order to challenge Cold War understandings of “ ­ public” and
“private” essential to the separate spheres model. For while it may seem
surprising initially to claim that the state could emanate from the home,
98  A Private Public Sphere
Duncan’s anarchism would promote just such a belief—that is, in the
smallest conceivable notion of the state. To understand the function and
critical significance of this nascent counterpublic requires a clear sense
of Habermas’s influential if controversial masterpiece, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), as well as the responses to
it from political scientists, cultural studies scholars, and literary critics.
Recent thinkers have provided much needed elaboration and critique to
­Habermas’s original theory of the bourgeois public sphere, which assumes
language to operate in the service of “truth” and to do so for specifically
sanctioned subjects. As Nancy Fraser succinctly describes it, the public
sphere is not the state itself but, rather, “a theater in modern societies in
which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk…
[I]t is a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in
principle be critical of the state” (110). Habermas’s public sphere is simi-
larly separate from the realm of market relations; it is “one of discursive
relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying
and selling” (Fraser 111). Habermas’s theories have been justly criticized
for projecting an idealized citizen (along with his concomitantly idealized
context) who might thus enter into public discourse. Michael Warner has
elaborated on what it might mean for that citizen to be a part of a public
and to participate in such a discourse. As Warner conceptualizes it, any
given discourse is written by a private individual under a given, specific
set of circumstances that generate this discourse; however, public dis-
course “promises to address anybody. It commits itself in principle to the
possible participation of any stranger. It therefore puts at risk the concrete
world that is its given condition of possibility” (113). The nature of public
discourse, in that it must postulate an inclusive field of circulation beyond
its “positive, given audience,” necessitates its instability, rendering public
discourse an “engine for (not necessarily progressive) social mutation”
(113). Warner also elaborates on what Fraser initially calls the “subaltern
counterpublic,” a group that is a part of the greater “public” but whose
members maintain an awareness of themselves as not simply separate
from the wider public but subordinate to it. (He later shortens this phrase
to “counterpublic.”) This distinction, which may be either inherent and
lasting or passing and/or voluntary, is not limited to questions of ideas
or policies but includes those of discourse and modes of address as well.
The counterpublic represents “not merely a different or alternative idiom
but one that in other contexts would be regarded with hostility or with
a sense of indecorousness,” and, significantly, “participation in such a
public is one of the ways by which its members’ identities are formed
and transformed. A hierarchy or stigma is the assumed background of
practice. One enters at one’s own risk” (119–21). Warner’s work on coun-
terpublics represents the most significant addition to Habermas’s initial
theory of the public sphere for those interested in the possibilities for
social justice that the public sphere may or may not enable.
 A Private Public Sphere  99
Though Habermas’s theory was initially created around a model his-
torically situated during the eighteenth century, it has a particular reso-
nance when relocated to the Cold War. A number of important critical
studies describe how the powerfully hegemonic Cold War ideal of the
home as containment culture developed. In becoming narrativized as
a place of escape, home life became a domestic analogue to ­A merica’s
foreign policy model. According to Elaine Tyler May, the “classless,
­homogenous, and family centered” model of “the American way of
life” envisioned a home designed to provide an impetus for commodity
­culture through leisure activities (172). Warner and Lauren Berlant use-
fully amplify and extend Tyler May’s critique of this “mirage” as a

home base of pre-political humanity from which citizens are thought

to come into political discourse and to which they are expected to
return in the (always imaginary) future after political conflict.
(193)

The term “mirage” indicates rightly that this story of what a home should
be did not often square with lived experience that demanded a combi-
nation of endless hours of unfulfilling work for male providers, imposed
the ennui of the “feminine mystique” on the female h ­ omemakers, and
introduced a stifling atmosphere of conformity and commodity-based
play for the child. This crushing banality of everyday life was the dark
side of the mid-century American dream. Such privatized standardiza-
tion recalls Habermas’s theory that an individual must “bracket off”
his markers of class, status, and identity in order to enter into public
dialogue. Few critics would advocate that this “bracketing” was ever
an effective way to pursue interests within the public sphere. Yet, the
­“mirage” effect can make such an image all the more powerful: it be-
comes the impossible standard that few individuals can attain but many
nevertheless feel compelled to attempt to reach.1

*****

Duncan and Jess lived together in a house in San Francisco’s ­M ission

District for most of their relationship, which began in 1951. 2 Their
home, located at 3267 20th St., was reportedly a literal collage of books,
paintings, and records.3 Both men used a collage technique in their art
and both had a fascination with the recurrence of cultural images in
­various guises over time, whether through mythology, religion, litera-
ture, or pop culture. In a characteristically convoluted, dense, and in-
tellectually fruitful epistolary passage, dated January 14, 1958, Duncan
manages, in the space of one long sentence, to touch on a number of
concepts central to understanding much of his writing as well as the
artwork of Jess. These include distinctions made between the public and
100  A Private Public Sphere
the private; what is open and what is hidden; and the nature of human
sexuality, community, and law.

[P]ubes (the lovely hair of the private parts) and public are etymo-
logically identical: the contrapuntal adult being suggests that it is the
mystery of Man-hood; and then the community of men and women
as creators of the idea of Man that is involved. “A body of people
living in the same place under the same laws”—the community then
defined by its laws.
(BANC Folder 2000.9)

Duncan argues here that those aspects of personal life that we com-
monly take to be the most private (our so-called “private” parts and
their connection to adult sexuality) are integrally related to our “public”
lives as a part of a community of other adults, all citizens living under
one set of laws. The form, not strictly rigorous, that this series of ideas
takes—the fanciful etymology—works in his correspondence with the
poet Robin Blaser in a way that is quite similar to that in which collage
often works in his poetry. It juxtaposes ancient ideas with modern ones;
it combines disparate ideas and philosophies with little regard for the
boundaries that traditionally separate them; and it expects a great deal
of insight from the reader, who must come to the text as an equal rather
than as a student. Duncan is particularly concerned with the question of
what is considered to be valuable knowledge and how this knowledge is
acquired. Collage, like the fanciful etymology, works through a process
of accretion by the addition of new things, new ideas, and new van-
tage points for observation. Duncan preferred to call this “refocusing,”
rather than erasure, correction, or cutting away.4 It is a way of recalling
images from the past, and allowing them to combine with contemporary
images so as to “refocus” the way in which we understand the stories of
our culture, ancient and contemporary. 5
Like Duncan’s collage poetry, Jess’s “paste-ups,” which are his version
of the cut-and-paste collage, also work through a process of accretion.
They consist of great fields of images (sometimes hundreds of them), im-
ported largely from popular magazines (like Life) that the artist would
painstakingly arrange, spending often hundreds of hours on each piece,
which could be extremely large. (A Mouse’s Tail is 47″ × 32″.) Jess’s col-
lages combine historically distant materials with recent ones, and images
from popular culture with more obscure ones. His most characteristic
paste-ups use images from a wide variety of sources to elicit a nearly
Victorian sensibility. They often contain an overabundance of images,
making it very difficult to separate smaller, individual images from the
larger ones: in this sense, these paste-ups require real work from their
viewer. The colors in this body of work tend to be dark; this, combined
with the overcrowded effect from the large number of individual images,
 A Private Public Sphere  101
and the confusion resulting from what can be a sense of ambiguity about
the connections between individual images, lend the paste-ups a feeling
of mystery. There seems to be a revelation to be made here, only it is one
that is not readily apparent to most viewers. The secret may be unlocked,
if at all, only with repeated, careful deciphering of these dense puzzles of
interconnected images.
This chapter is primarily concerned with three collage texts: Jess’s
early paste-up, The Mouse’s Tale (1951), along with two sections of
Duncan’s extended series “Passages,” “Passage 1: Tribal Memories,” and
“The Architecture: Passages 9.”6 These texts articulate a theory of living
that emanates from the home, or “household” as Duncan preferred. This
theory of living was lived by the artists in the most prosaic way possible.
Based on an intense integration of all action, personal, political, or pro-
fessional, it proceeds from the formal strategies of the avant-garde, the
idea that art and life could be combined into one. Duncan and Jess used
the methods of collage in order to integrate art and life in the midst of
a society that remained utterly opposed to this philosophy, interrupting
the story that Cold War culture wanted to tell about itself, one that at-
tempted to erase the images of the past.
These collage texts by Duncan and Jess represent two sides of a pri-
vate public sphere. The sections from “Passages” form a cultural and
architectural plan for the home as the basis of community, through the
idealization of the privacy that can inhere within a family domicile, as
a positive value in itself, not merely a reversal of the “public” outside.
Jess’s paste-up represents the obverse of Duncan’s utopian thought. It
provides a vision of the subjugation that the individual faces when he
is left without the shadows and recesses of the household. Its large im-
age of a solitary nude male figure, crouched in terror, is literally naked
before the state. Yet his body is composed of other, small nude men,
forming a composite image of the solitary individual of the Cold War
as well as the public of which he is a (perhaps unknowing) part. This
paste-up thus functions as a warning against the view of society cham-
pioned throughout the Cold War.
If the familial ideal of Cold War suburban life required cultural and
historical forgetfulness, these collage texts expose the way that images
recur over time, allowing the artists to become receptacles for the images
of the past. While such images may seem ahistorical, Cold War society’s
willful forgetfulness turned a blind eye toward their historically specific
truth. The techniques that Duncan and Jess developed allowed them
to use their art to combat this forgetting, and so to create their own
idealized version of a politicized family life. Rather than bracketing off
politics from the home, they worked to foster and maintain a household
that integrated politics within its walls. To live in “sheltered homosex-
ual domesticity”—as Duncan referred to their living situation—in the
1950s may be necessarily to form a political household, though this is
102  A Private Public Sphere
not the end of how politics was integrated within Duncan and Jess’s
home life. An understanding of what Duncan called grand collage as
a way of organizing a life demonstrates how the home can be properly
political in its idealization of privacy, one that can be understood as a
type of counterpublic. Counterpublics are “[f]undamentally mediated by
public forms… [and] incorporate the personal/impersonal address and
expansive estrangement of public speech as conditions of their common
world” (“Publics and Counterpublics” 121). While the question of the
counterpublic might be important to any essay on self-identified mem-
bers of the gay community in this era, it becomes particularly relevant
given Duncan’s notorious 1944 essay, “The Homosexual in Society.”

*****

No discussion of the terms “public” and “private” with regard to D­ uncan’s

poetry can ignore this essay, first published in Dwight ­McDonald’s jour-
nal Politics. Primarily known for being the first instance of an individual
publicly coming out of the closet, “The Homosexual in Society” outlines
Duncan’s particular stance regarding his own identity and that of what
he terms his “own group”:

[O]nly one devotion can be held by a human being seeking a creative

life and expression, and that is a devotion to human freedom…. To
do this one must disown all the special groups (nations, churches,
sexes, races) that would claim allegiance…. [T]he old protective
­associations will be there, offering for a surrender of one’s humanity
congratulation upon one’s special nature and value…. It must be
always remembered that one’s own honesty, one’s battle against the
inhumanity of his own group (be it against patriotism, against big-
otry, against—in this special case—the homosexual cult) is a battle
that cannot be won in the immediate scene. The forces of inhuman-
ity are overwhelming, but only one’s continued opposition can make
any other order possible….
(11)7

One might expect that an early article on the topic of the position of gay
people in society would address the legal and social barriers to integra-
tion, a facet of his topic Duncan all but ignores. To be a great artist, he
argues, one must reject all allegiances narrower than the human; to do
otherwise requires a rejection of one’s humanity. He is equally uncon-
cerned about homo- and heterosexuality. His focus is a rejection of the
“homosexual cult,” which he identifies primarily with a form of lan-
guage, “camp.”8
In “The Homosexual in Society,” and particularly in the notes added
to the essay in 1959, Duncan develops a dialogic sense of what it means to
 A Private Public Sphere  103
be a part of—and, in particular, to be an artist contributing to—a public
in contrast to something akin to a counterpublic in Warner’s sense. One
might object to the connection of the “homosexual cults” that Duncan
describes here with counterpublics because of their ­apolitical nature;
in this sense, they might be closer to a subculture. However, Duncan’s
description clarifies their oppositional stance and subaltern status with
respect to the greater public, essential qualities of the counterpublic.
Duncan’s notes on the essay elaborate as such:

[O]ften I must come, where I would begin a friendship, to odd mo-

ments of trial and doubts when I must deliver an account of my
sexual nature that there be no mistake in our trust.
But the inspiration of the essay was toward something else, a
­public trust, larger and more demanding than the respect of friends.
To be respected as a member of the political community for what
one knew in one’s heart to be respectable! To insist, not upon toler-
ance for a divergent sexual practice, but upon concern for the virtues
of a homosexual relationship!…. Love is dishonored where sexual
love between those of the same sex is despised; and where love is
dishonored there is no public trust.
(12)

The significance of this conception of the “public” reflects not on the

imagined scene of “coming out” which takes place at the end of the first
section quoted earlier, nor, for that matter, in his actual coming out,
which takes place toward the end of the original essay.9 Coming out to a
friend—no matter how “odd” the actual moment may be—is a moment
of intimacy, an assurance of the “trust” between friends that Duncan
takes to be essential, but expected. What is of higher concern here is
what he terms “public trust,” a term that feels nearly archaic even for
the 1940s.
Duncan asserts that what we might now term liberal notions of mul-
ticulturalism (“tolerance,” for instance) are unacceptable when attempt-
ing to conceive of the public as “the” public rather than a series of small
groups. To be tolerated for “divergent sexual practice[s]” is still to be
sequestered away from the majority. There can be no “public” per se
when certain ideas of love are held unacceptable. The relations con-
nected to love and sexuality, commonly taken to be the most deeply pri-
vate ­aspect of private life, are, for Duncan, the essential bond of public
life. One cannot be a member of the public if one’s intimate relations are
rejected, and for the public to reject any group’s ability to love is to suffer
an ­essential damage to its integrity. The examples here from literature
(Proust, Melville) clarify his stance that the artist must speak to “the”
public, and that his primary task is to transform his “private” emotions
and experiences into something communal, something “public.” As it
104  A Private Public Sphere
becomes clear through a reading of his poetry, the proper scene of the
counterpublic for Duncan is not the “homosexual cult” but rather the
politicized home.

*****

Though the connections Duncan makes between the home, what are
commonly taken to be aspects of “private” life (sexuality, love, and
­family relations), and the “public sphere” are most clearly put forward
in “The Homosexual in Society,” these are far from absent in his po-
etry, despite its more elliptical nature. Duncan referred to his method
of ­writing as grand collage. This coinage defines a type of writing that
combines typical sorts of influences—historical and contemporary—
with collage’s formal strategies, including juxtaposition, and the use of
citation, ­quotation, and heavy allusion.10 Stephen Fredman describes
grand collage as “a kind of mystical art of assemblage, in which the
poet sees hidden ­correspondences among disparate sources, claiming
no ­originality for his art other than in the finding and arranging of
the materials.” Not just a poetic method, for Duncan, grand collage
became “an overarching principle of the imagination…” (84). His ex-
tended poetic series “Passages” is in part Duncan’s attempt to use col-
lage poetics in order to grapple with the mythopoetic forces that he saw
as being the determining ones in human lives in all their manifestations,
whether they appear in the form of mythic lore and narrative, in war
and other conflicts, in sexuality, in art, or in scenes from his own per-
sonal life at home.
The first poem of the series, entitled “Tribal Memories,” makes
­explicit the work’s deep commitment to exposing the mythopoetic na-
ture of life, at the same time as it forms a kind of ur-text—in that it
contains a ­creation myth—for the work as a whole. The poem, appropri-
ately enough, begins with a quotation from a mythological source that
had inspired the poet to write:

From the Emperor Julian, Hymn to the Mother of the Gods:

And Attis encircles the heavens like a tiara, and thence
sets out as though to descend to earth.
●
For the even is bounded, but the uneven is without bounds
and there is no way through or out of it.
(ll. 1–5)11

Attis is the son and lover of Cybele, queen of the gods. He breaks away
from the heavens, which are bounded, fully formed, and perfect, and de-
scends to the chaotic, imperfect, boundless world of matter, the earth.12
Against the reading that the Emperor Julian had given to these lines,
 A Private Public Sphere  105
Duncan’s grand collage works to develop his poetic series here with a
fascination and favor toward the unbounded, the uneven, and the imper-
fect.13 As a series, “Passages” develops its collage poetics as a means to
“exceed[…] conscious design” by the poet as to its form ­( Jenkins, Poetic
Obligation 138); these poems “relinquish the comforts of unities as well
as teleological structures” as a part of their grand collage (Bertholf 28).
A certain type of openness is presumed to be a part of the unbounded,
precluded by things that are bounded, even, or perfect. This openness
is necessary for the production of knowledge or understanding. At the
same time, Duncan’s use of collage allows for a countervailing sense of
mystery to remain in things that are uneven or imperfect. The relative
obscurity of his references and the lack of standardized marking-off of
the quotations allow for the unbounded to produce shadows where light
cannot fall. These shadows are a necessity for the production and main-
tenance of mystery and privacy, essential elements of Duncan’s Cold War
household. The predilection for “shadows,” for privacy, is one of the
ways in which Duncan’s poetics can be considered anti-narrative. This
sense of mystery provides a different way of understanding the world
than society’s dominant narratives.
After the initial quotation from the Emperor Julian, the poem begins
with an invocation to one of Duncan’s recurring images, a female figure
representing a goddess/mother who, in his poems, will stand in for the
power of creation:

TRIBAL MEMORIES PASSAGES 1

And to Her-Without-Bounds I send,

wherever She wanders,   by what
  campfires at evening,
among tribes setting each the City where
  we Her people are
at the end of a day’s reaches   here
  the Eternal
lamps lit, here the wavering human
  sparks of heat and light
glimmer, go out reappear.
For this is the company of the living
and the poet’s voice speaks from no
crevice in the ground between
mid-earth and underworld
breathing fumes of what is deadly to know,
news larvae in tombs
and twists of time do feed upon,
106  A Private Public Sphere
but from the hearth stone, the lamp light,
the heart of the matter where the
 
house is held ●
(ll. 6–25)

The poet here dedicates his work to “Her-Without-Bounds”—Cybele, pre-

sumably, but this could be any of a number of these female figures who
initiate the originary act of making. This poesis forms a communal act not
an individual one: it takes place among “tribes,” in the “City where/we
Her people are.” The poet is specifically not a solitary figure: not the typ-
ical vatic figure of poetry, working in subterranean seclusion to create a
private world (the type of figure that Duncan himself is often described as).
Instead, his voice speaks from the “hearth stone, the lamp light,/the heart
of the matter where the/house is held,” which represents the literal heart
of communal and familial life, the home (and more so, its fireplace) as the
physical manifestation of human relations.14 The household is crucially
important as the place from where poesis emanates, despite the poem be-
ing set in a mythic and not a personal locale. The household, and the
familial and sexual bonds created there, are both the most basic and the
strongest units of any community; these bonds are created and maintained
through the act of grand collage, the juxtaposition of recurring images.
Duncan uses the aural resources of language to emphasize the mythic
and communal nature of his making in its connection to song. The primary
technique he uses is the repetition of sounds (which parallels the repetition
of images), and in particular, the sounds of “h,” “th,” “sh,” and “w”: “And
to Her-Without-Bounds I send,/wherever She wanders,” as well as the lines
cited in the previous paragraph. In the first line of the poem’s next section,
the spell created by the lulling effect of the soft, repetitive sounds from the
previous section is suddenly broken, both in content and form:

yet here, the warning light at the edge of town!

The City will go out in time, will go out

into time, hiding even its embers.
And we were scattered throughout the countries and times of man

for we took alarm in ourselves,

rumors of the enemy
spread among the feathers of the wing that coverd us.
●
(ll. 27–33)

Pulled from the warmth of the communal hearthstone, “we” are im-
mersed in crisis. This sudden change in tone is paralleled by the ­repetition
of “t” sounds and the exclamation point as the dominant punctuation
 A Private Public Sphere  107
mark, as opposed to the continuity proposed by commas. There is a
­tension and a contrast set up in these early lines between two states of
being: one, a type of lulled inattention, associated with warmth, dark-
ness, softness, repetitive sounds, and a helpless, almost intrauterine
comfort; the other, a watchful attentiveness, associated with light, loud,
or hard sounds, clear thought, and definitive action.15
From the end of this section through the rest of the poem, Duncan
uses the formal strategies of grand collage in order to literalize these two
mental states—the lulled inattention and the watchful attention—into a
type of myth concerning the coming to being of human civilization. The
sense of wholeness that was initially associated with the heavens—before
Attis descends—and is then connected to the warmth of the hearth is
finally extended to describe a type of pre-civilization myth, with all be-
ings protected under the wing of a mother bird. This comforting warmth
of the mother bird is initially described through the occasion of its loss:
“for we took alarm in ourselves,/ rumors of the enemy/ spread among
the feathers of the wing that coverd us.” The time of unified wholeness
is experienced as a memory, and it turns out to be memory embodied:

Mnemosyne, they named her, the

Mother with the whispering
feathered wings. Memory,
the great speckled bird who broods over the
nest of souls, and her egg,
the dream in which all things are living,
I return to, leaving my self.
(ll. 34–40)

Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses—the mother of all art—is the

whispering susurrus of memory, the enveloping web of images of the past
that creates grand collage. In this state of being, “all things are living,”
and all times, thoughts, and images are simultaneously alive and avail-
able for poesis.
In this first section of “Passages,” the desire to return to first things
becomes, most literally, a dream or vision of the first thing of all, here
imagined as a “World Egg.”16 All things are here bounded and con-
tained in the singularity and wholeness of the egg.

I am beside myself with this

thought of the One in the World –Egg,
enclosed, in a shell of murmurings,
rimed round,
sound chambered child.
(ll. 41–5)
108  A Private Public Sphere
The image of the “World Egg” both contains and brings on the state
of inattention, which the poet describes as being “beside myself.”17 The
repetition of sounds is prevalent again here, with “rimed round,/sound
chambered child” and “I am beside myself with this/thought” as the most
explicit examples, containing repetition of “r,” “ch,” and “th.” The de-
sire to return to the “first things” becomes a multilayered image of grand
collage as the narrative of the birth of civilization through the “World
Egg” is layered over an image of pre-birth wholeness and comfort within
the uterus.18 The “sound chambered child” who is “enclosed in a shell
of murmurings” can just as easily be seen as a type of pre-birth mem-
ory, with muffled sounds penetrating the child’s self-enclosed “shell.” But
­suddenly, the dream of wholeness and undifferentiated warmth is broken:

It’s that first! The forth-going to be

bursts into green as the spring
winds blow watery from the south
And the sun returns north.  He hides
fire among words in his mouth
and comes racing out of the zone of dark and storm
toward us.
(ll. 46–52)

This is a sudden birth, a breaking out of the comfort and warmth of undif-
ferentiated latency and into the movement and “forth-going to be” of the in-
dividuated self; for the moment, it is not traumatic, but rather identified with
“green” and the coming of “spring.” There is a promise of knowledge—“He
hides/ fire among words in his mouth”—along with action and movement
(“and comes racing out of the zone of dark and storm/ toward us”).
The final lines of the poem return to the original tension between
states of being, in which the poet cannot decide whether to inhabit the
comfortable pleasure of latent wholeness or the active, powerful move-
ment of individuation:

I sleep in the afternoon, retreating from work,

reading and dropping away from the reading,
as if I were only a seed of myself,
unawakened, unwilling
   to sleep or awake.
(ll. 53–7)

As the poem comes to a close, the speaker is seen fitfully moving be-
tween states of active, differentiated attention (associated with work
and ­reading) and passive, inattentive wholeness (associated with sleep
 A Private Public Sphere  109
and dreaming). Despite the positive connotations given to the moment
of birth, and to the moment of individuation, there remains within the
speaker a desire to return to the sleeping state, the state of being a “seed,”
containing the latent potential of all things within one. The passive com-
fort of the sleeping state is aligned with the idea of “the bounded” or
“even,” where everything has a mate and the system is closed. This equi-
librium is alluring, but must be balanced with, and ultimately rejected in
favor of, the state of active attentiveness, associated with the unbounded
and the uneven. The openness of the uneven allows for the possibility of
new information, new additions, change, and growth. This cycle of mov-
ing between these two states will, as we see, form a parallel to the way in
which Duncan and Jess attempt to form an integral Cold War household
that rejects the “separate spheres” model, combining the worlds of work
and politics (associated with change and activity) with those of the home,
love, and comfort (associated with stasis and contentment).

*****

“Passages 9: The Architecture” thematizes in an explicit way what is im-

plicit in much of Duncan’s writing—the connection between the home
(as a physical place) and the type of immanent knowledge that Duncan
believes is latent in humans, but must be brought into immediate pres-
ence. This documentary collage poem uses quotations from the book
Craftsman Homes by Gustave Stickley (1909), which are juxtaposed to
the description of the speaker, reading as he listens to the Bertolt Brecht
and Kurt Weill opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. These
“passages” describe an idealized home as a physical manifestation of
the intimacy and interactions of its residents; as well, “[f]or Duncan, the
design of the house mirrors the design of the poem” (Fredman 87). The
intimacy and comfort provided by the home forms a protective barrier,
which may initially seem similar to the Cold War ideal of the home as
an oasis from the outside world. In “The Architecture,” however, the
household provides not a cocoon of pleasure separate from the “real”
world but a place of stability that maintains the mystery necessary to
move from latency to action. For Duncan, poetry becomes “not a rev-
olutionary’s tool,” but rather “a creative means of striving toward an
alternative vision of life, one rivaling the state’s idea of what life ought
to be” (Keenaghan, “Life, War, and Love” 635). The household is a vi-
tal aspect of the artist’s poesis—which is to say, functionally integrated
with the remainder of the world.19
The privacy present in Duncan’s idealized home also contains those
dark places that allow for the images of the past to repeat, images the
Cold War containment culture would repress. One of the more import-
ant authors of Duncan’s grand collage, Sigmund Freud, develops in his
brief essay, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919) the idea that what is most familiar
110  A Private Public Sphere
(Heimlich or home-y) may also be the most frightening (Unheimlich or
“uncanny”). Freud’s essay derives the term “uncanny” through various
languages to find that it is a word that develops into an ambivalence:
“Thus Heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an
ambivalence until finally it coincides with its opposite, Unheimlich”
(241). It becomes clear through Freud’s series of definitions and deriva-
tions that the term Heimlich refers to a type of familiarity centering in
the home. This home-like familiarity becomes associated over time with
privacy: that which is familiar, intimate, is also not public, and therefore
is hidden from the public eye. It is thus that the word Heimlich, home-y,
becomes identical with its opposite, ­Unheimlich, the uncanny. Duncan
courts and maintains precisely this tension in “Passages 9.”
The remarkable interplay in “The Architecture” between images of
dark and light, literal and metaphorical, comes from the description
of the physical structure of the house. There is, on the one hand, the
“window-­shelter,” “the light,” and the surprising “curtains of daffodil-­
yellow”; on the other hand, we have the recesses described by the initial
Stickley quotation (“it must have recesses”), a type of planned darkness
and allowance for shadows, indicated in the poem by the word recesst.
At the same time, the speaker listens to Mahagonny and imagines the
staging of it: “the procession with drum-roll/ in the distance/ recesst/
(the stage becomes dark).”20 Directly after the parenthetically imag-
ined description of this operatic production, there is an inventory of the
bookcases of the house—as if the speaker, momentarily lulled away by
the music, wants to establish that he has not strayed from his reading:

from the bookcases   the glimmering titles arrayed   keys

Hesiod ● Heraklitus ● The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics…
La Revelation d’Hermes Trismegiste
Plutarch’s Morals: Theosophical Essays
Avicenna/ The Zohar
The Aurora
(ll. 20–22, 26–30)

He then makes the assertion:

I was reading while the music playd

  Curld up among the ornamental cushions
  [….]
sparkling into the jeweld highlights given forth by
copper, brass, or embroideries
(ll. 30–31, 33–4)

Within the Gnostic tradition, the texts listed are all believed to contain
within them the secrets of divine illumination. This is another example
of the balancing act between the necessity of darkness and the promise
 A Private Public Sphere  111
of light. The speaker, “reading while the music playd,” is surrounded by
this interplay of dark and light, both intellectually, in his reading, and
physically, as the cushions sparkle in the light let in from the windows.
In the next section, darkness threatens to overtake light as it is sud-
denly night in the garden:

Below the house   in the dark of the peppertree

stript to the moonlight embraced
  for the mystery’s sake mounting
  thru us ● the garden’s recesses
(ll. 39–42)

The use of repetitive “m” sounds (“moonlight,” “for the mystery’s sake
mounting”) signals the lulling effect of the night, the mystery, the plea-
sure of comfort and stasis. In the garden, at night, with only the light of
the moon for illumination, the recesses threaten to overtake any search
for knowledge. The threat seems intensified as, for the only time in the
work, the description of the house departs significantly from the doc-
umentary quotation from Stickley, who only mentions “French doors
opening out upon a porch” (196). Duncan here represents exteriority
with “the dark of the peppertree/ stript to the moonlight.” Returning
to the current moment of narration in the poem does not necessitate a
departure from the world of warmth:

the lamplight   warm upon the page where I ●

  romance   ● in which lost, reading ●
(ll. 50–51)

The syntax breaks down fully, intensifying the sensation of being “lost,
reading” as the speaker seems to lose himself in the book and his thoughts.
Throughout the poem, documentary quotations from Stickley’s
Craftsman Homes are juxtaposed to descriptions of the speaker and his
surroundings. These quotations describe a house designed to allow for
the interplay of dark and light. This is accomplished through planned
recesses and dark spaces; through functional aspects of the rooms (like
the bookcases and fireplaces) that add depth and complication to the
floor plan; through the use of passages that connect the interior and
exterior; and through a prominent staircase designed to link the lower
(light, public, and social) and upper (dark, private, and sexual/personal)
parts of the house. Here is the full section of Stickley’s text:

it must have recesses. There is a great charm in a room broken up in

plan, where that slight feeling of mystery is given to it which arises
when you cannot see the whole room from any one place… when
there is always something around the corner….
(136)
112  A Private Public Sphere
Take a house planned in this way, with a big living room, its great
fireplace, open staircase, casement windows, built-in seats, cup-
boards, bookcases… and perhaps French doors opening out upon
a porch….
(196)
the staircase, instead of being hidden away in a small hall or treated
as a necessary evil, made one of the most beautiful and prominent
features of the room because it forms a link between the social part
of the house and the upper regions… /… which belong to the inner
and individual part of the family life.
(196)

This passage is remarkable for its noninstrumentality—the reasons

given for the decisions being made are not based on financial or practi-
cal concerns but rather emotional and psychic ones (“charm,” “full of
mystery”). A utilitarian thing is made to perform a nonutilitarian func-
tion: to provide pleasure and maintain the mystery of the household. The
interplay between the home and the occupant runs in both directions.
Stickley was one of the more important architects of the Arts & Crafts
Movement, born out of a desire to merge an earlier, pre-Industrial Revo-
lution model for the design of everyday objects with more contemporary
production techniques, so that beautiful, seemingly handmade objects
could be produced on a greater scale. Compared with most industrial the-
ories, the Arts & Crafts Movement maintained an emphasis on the local,
the individual, and the idiosyncratic, rather than the global, the mass pro-
duced, and the standardized. Duncan’s poetic rearticulation of Stickley’s
theories of home design, however, depends less on an emphasis on hand-
crafted elements than a balancing of the ideas of mystery and openness,
the public and private aspects of home and family life. Stickley’s theories
were, ultimately, ones that established an intermediary between the ideal-
ization of handcrafted goods and the movement toward industrialization
and standardization. Duncan’s recontextualization of Stickley becomes
preposterous in the Cold War context, with the coming of the tract homes
of Levittowns.
The home as Stickley describes it, too, is not merely a passive recep-
tacle or medium in which a person resides, but rather an active force in
the way that the individual may interact with other household members
as they all go about their daily lives. The home is the focal point for
all human activities and for any type of community, just as language is
the central link between humans, our shared communicative medium.
Duncan detailed his thoughts regarding language’s communal nature to
Robin Blaser in a letter dated June 3, 1958:

Remembering ruins upon ruins of feeling that poets have left for their
own glory and our misleading, where the poet denies the language
 A Private Public Sphere  113
is a communal medium. Where the hell does he think words come
from? A man’s feelings atrophy when he tries to with-hold them
from their source in the human record. Well, he can’t hold them en-
tirely apart; and if consciousness and reverence for the source is in-
tolerable, there remains, thank God, the unconscious (which moves
to create or destroy out of reverence) and the poems, the mistrusted
sprouts thru the resistance.
(BANC Folder 2000.10)

Duncan views the unconscious as a driving force in human life, one

that insists we recall sources in the past, whether that recollection is
pleasurable or intolerable. Images from the past will repeat themselves,
will return to the present, despite all human efforts to proclaim a “new
age,” with a clean break from history and memory. Grand collage was
­Duncan’s poetic technique for encouraging this repetition of images.
This juxtapositional collage form allows Duncan to interrupt and re-
write the stories that Cold War era society wanted to tell about itself, as
it attempted to manufacture forgetfulness and create an apolitical home
as a sanctuary from the “real world.”
The first phrase that Duncan quotes from Stickley, “it must have re-
cesses,” provides an imperative for the home—which, given Duncan’s
recontextualization, takes a metonymic relationship to the whole of pri-
vate life in the home—to maintain hiddenness, darkness, and mystery in
opposition to the then-prevalent home design for openness and a lack of
privacy. The remainder of the passage

There is a great charm in a room broken up in plan, where that slight

feeling of mystery is given to it which arises when you cannot see the
whole room from any one place… when there is always something
around the corner….

continues to give precedence to a design for living in which the entire

truth about the home cannot be comprehended in one glance.
The contemporary Cold War trends in home design and suburban
lifestyle stand in stark contrast to this philosophy of living. Though
Duncan is often seen as the quintessential inwardly directed poet, re-
sponding only to his own spiritual or mystical impulses and to the lit-
erary precedents set for him by other poets, he did, of course, write an
extensive body of work dealing with the current events of the 1960s,
including the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and (most famously)
the Vietnam war. As he wrote in “Passages 1,” his vision of the proper
position for the social poet is not a “crevice in the/ ground between/
mid-earth and underworld.” On the contrary, he should work from
“where the/house is held.” Duncan’s philosophy regarding the commu-
nal nature of poetry saw that poetry’s social value would be destroyed
114  A Private Public Sphere
when the balance between the public and the private was not main-
tained. If imagination could enrich politics, then politics might in
return “deplete imagination through a transfer of energy back into a
black hole of unacknowledged, repressed desire” (Smith 405). Thus, a
dangerous balance must be preserved, lest poets find that by throwing
themselves into affairs of the moment, imagination disappears entirely.
In work and life, the poet must learn how to be simultaneously public
and private, open and hidden, and ancient and contemporary, an idea
that is completely contrary to the Habermasian notion of the public
sphere and how one enters public life. From Duncan’s own perspec-
tive, the fact that his poetry was often not consumed in the minutia
of contemporary events did not mean that it was hermetic. Rather, the
integration of what is significant in contemporary life with the import-
ant learning from the past was essential for enlightened interactions.
Similarly, while the vision of the household in “The Architecture” is
easily subsumed in the context of comfort and stasis, it seems clear, par-
ticularly from the description of the interaction between the physical
surroundings of the house and the poet’s intellectual activities in it, that
the house is not so much an escape from the outside world (a “mirage”
as Warner and Berlant would have it) as the crucial point from which all
outwardly directed action can emanate. The type of house one lives in,
in this scheme, determines what type of action one can then take, and
what kind of life one might lead.
A house designed with recesses is one that can afford its inhabitants a
degree of privacy—that is to say, privacy from each other—that the open
floor plan homes common in suburban America of the 1960s could not.
Deborah Nelson delineates the seemingly paradoxical nature of Cold
War privacy in suburban homes, whereby they were “supposed to offer
the opportunity to live out the democratic dream of privacy in postwar
America…. [T]rue to the paradox of postwar privacy, suburban homes…
were associated with a profound deprivation of privacy as well” (85).
The dream of home ownership became reality for an increasing number
of Americans after World War II, in part through the type of standard-
ized mass production that Stickley and the Arts & Crafts Movement
fought. More than fifty years later, what could be accomplished through
standardization was much greater, as was the degree to which it was
realized. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan’s interviews of white
middleclass housewives in suburban America reveal that, as Duncan and
Stickley had intuited, the type of home that a person lived in had a pro-
found effect on the type of actions one could take in it:

[Open plan homes] give the illusion of more space for less money.
But the women to whom they are sold almost have to live the femi-
nine mystique. There are no true walls or doors; the woman in the
beautiful electronic kitchen is never separated from her children. She
 A Private Public Sphere  115
need never feel alone for a minute, need never be by herself. She can
forget her own identity in these noisy open-plan houses.
(348)

The effect that these houses had on the women who spent nearly all
their time in them was an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness due to,
in Friedan’s analysis, a lack of purpose. What Friedan termed the “femi-
nine mystique,” the belief that total fulfillment should come, for women,
from housework, cooking, and child and husband care, did not provide
the promised meaning to many of these suburban women. Their homes
were designed with large windows, few doors, small bedrooms, but large
family rooms: they minimized privacy within the family. The opposite
of the home described by Duncan (and Stickley) in “Passages 9,” this
is a home with no mystery and no shadows. 21 The housewives Friedan
interviewed were those affected by the separation of what had been the
integral agrarian household into the “separate spheres” of home and
work. Duncan’s idealization of the household as a place of mystery but
also one of (conceivably political) action provides a counter to the other-
wise hegemonic ideal of the Cold War household.

*****

For Duncan, the workings of the unconscious, understood via Freud’s

theories, was another aspect of the life in myth that he believed has an
equal importance with the pragmatic life of the everyday. 22 Also relevant
to Duncan was Freud’s attention to language and word play—to unex-
pected word origins, to slips of the tongue. Michael André ­B ernstein
tallied Duncan’s seemingly contradictory influences:

His faith in the revelatory authority of dreams, etymologies, puns

and verbal “accidents,” his responsiveness to a hidden voice in lan-
guage and consciousness itself, owes as much to Freud’s charting
of the tropes and vicissitudes of human desire as it does to the the-
osophist teachings of his adopted parents and his own subsequent
readings in the lore of hermetic mysticism.
(185)

Freudian psychoanalysis, much like Gnosticism, is a type of hermetic

knowledge that posits the possibility of enlightened insight through
­language—though usually spoken language (“the talking cure”) rather
than written. The idea that the ultimate truth is in plain sight if you only
know where to look is one important philosophical trait that these two
systems have in common.
Like Duncan, Freud argued that the home was the key to an under-
standing of the psyche, and that this enlightenment might happen in the
116  A Private Public Sphere
dark. In “The ‘Uncanny,’” mentioned previously, Freud puts forth a now
well-known thesis that much of what causes anxiety in the unknown
is the aspect of it that is not unknown at all but in fact overly familiar.
Freud posits that what is commonly understood as the uncanny has to
do with a return of something repressed:

[W]e can understand why linguistic usage has extended das ­Heimliche
(“homely”) into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in
reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and
old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it
only through the process of repression. This reference to the factor
of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand… the uncanny
as something which ought to have remained hidden but has come to
light.
(241)

Freud’s gloss of the German terms Heimliche and Unheimliche suggests

what is particularly important about his theory for Duncan’s poetry.
For Freud, the uncanny is the “unhomely” or unfamiliar, containing
the seeds of the formerly familiar, now unrecognizable. Through the
conduit of the home and the privacy that may be cultivated therein, these
formerly repressed images may be brought to light. By way of his quota-
tions from Stickley, Duncan privileges the importance of the unfamiliar
within the privileged space of his own most familiar and most private/
public place, his home. 23
For Duncan, the images of the past return, insistently, and it is the
job of the collage poet to allow himself to be the receptacle of language,
to allow for the repetition of these images into the communal store of
memory. The incorporation of myth into the daily life of the house-
hold was a requirement for those who seek the illumination of g­ nosis.
This type of illumination requires reckoning with the Unheimliche,
that ­familiar–unfamiliar truth, the now-forgotten thing that must be
remembered in order to incorporate and then move beyond it. Duncan
and Jess made this search for the images that recur in cultural artifacts
an integral part of their home life. Their understanding of the impor-
tance of such images and refusal to turn a blind eye to the past is one
more way in which their household was opposed to the Cold War ideal
of suburban family life:

Jess and Duncan maintained a decidedly middle-class, domestic

household. In a sense, their isolation was a profound one, as they ex-
isted in a number of forbidden territories. They were telling stories,
researching myths, and evoking the past when everyone else seemed
consumed with the existential present in a dour way. And, of course,
 A Private Public Sphere  117
their homosexuality and open commitment to a family relationship
separated them from a good deal of the “moralities” that constituted
everyday life in the 1950s.
(Auping, “Jess: A Grand Collage” 39–40)

Dwelling in the territory of the forbidden, even if that forbidden was a

type of “sheltered homosexual domesticity,” meant that they were star-
ing directly at the Unheimliche of the Cold War era—the recurring hid-
den images society did not want as part of its history.

*****

Jess’s first major paste-up, The Mouse’s Tale (Figure 3.1), reflects openly
on issues of citizenship and public morality, and its materials originate
in pop culture. 24 In both its subject matter and its materials, this work
is something of an aberration; with the exception of his series entitled
Goddess Because…, which plays with a series of advertisements for
Modess sanitary napkins and its constructions of gender roles, the paste-
ups’ subjects are hermetic and obscure, while their materials are varied
and idiosyncratic. 25
The Mouse’s Tale is, in subject matter and materials, “public,” both
in the sense of the “public sphere” (in that it contains a commentary—
in fact a critique—on matters of the state), and in its open treatment
of homoerotic imagery, what Jess calls “homoeros.” Simply described,
The Mouse’s Tale is a composite image, a large image made up of other,
smaller juxtaposed images; in this case, the dominant figure is a male
nude, largely formed by an amalgamation of other, smaller, nude or
nearly nude men. 26 John Yau has claimed that in his paste-ups, Jess “en-
larges the narrative from the singular and heroic to the multiple and
democratic” (121). This claim seems literally reflected in The Mouse’s
Tale, as the large singular figure, facing the horrors of the later twentieth
century heroically alone, is opened up into the teeming multitudes.
This large figure is crouched low to the ground, one hand to his
mouth, the other raised above his head as if in terror, to ward off some
unseen evil. He is posed above an oil refinery; before him are gallows.
The gallows are formed by a collage of images: the noose is made up of a
series of clowns’ heads, while the gallows’ frame (only the top is visible)
consists of the heads of monkeys and a lion. In the middle of the gallows’
base appears the titular mouse’s tale/tail, taken from Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Along with the small pho-
tographs of anonymous men that constitute the larger male figure are
included two photographs of the artist, one of a priest, several other
images of male and female heads, and some of Jess’s favorite anatomical
images from nineteenth-century medical textbooks.
Figure 3.1  Jess (Burgess Franklin Collins), American, 1923–2004. The Mouse’s
Tale, 1951–1954. Gelatin silver prints, magazine reproductions, and
gouache on paper; 47 5/8 × 32 in. (120.97 × 81.28 cm). San F
­ rancisco
Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Frederic P. Snowden. © JESS - The
Jess Collins Trust. Photograph: Ben Blackwell.
 A Private Public Sphere  119
Most interpreters of this piece view it as humorous, and perhaps
mildly titillating, fluff. Jess describes it as restoring innocence to depic-
tions of sexuality:

[It] was constructed of male nudes with the idea of showing inno-
cent beauty as opposed to macho bodybuilding. It was a beginning
for me to see how I could reuse the recurrent images that would
jump out at me, for fantasy or mythological reasons, from all these
marvelous and seemingly innocent publications.
(Auping, “Interview with Jess” 25)

Critic Michael Duncan (no relation to Robert) describes Jess’s early col-
lages as light in tone,

extending to campy in-jokes; a fractured headline in Boob #3 (1954)

announces, “The story of how we once pleased women by being
forgetful—but only once.” The jokey gay esthetic of these works is
summed up in The Mouse’s Tale (1951), which features a huge fig-
ure composed of masses of photos of strutting and stretching male
models.
(57)

Though the male nude was once seen as a serious subject for artistic study,
in our contemporary culture, this is a rarity. Male beauty—the body
that is more muscular than utility demands or more delicately structured
than the prevailing standard of masculinity—has been deemed laughable
(“jokey”) as beauty (nonutility) is associated with a type of peculiarly fem-
inine uselessness. The images from the physique magazines combine male
beauty with an idealization of hypermasculinity—here, the muscle-bound
man—that troubles the typical binaries of male/female, strong/weak,
beautiful/ugly, butch/femme, or even Jess’s own citation of “macho body-
building” as opposed to “innocent beauty.” Leo Bersani has noted that

[t]he gay-macho style simultaneously invents the oxymoronic ex-

pression “leather queen” and denies its oxymoronic status; for the
macho straight man, leather queen is intelligible, indeed tolerable,
only as an oxymoron—which is of course to say that it must remain
unintelligible….
(207)

Jess’s paste-up, though preceding the figure of the “leather queen” by

about twenty years, is an early interrogation of precisely this type of
binary opposition through the oxymoronic merging of two seemingly
mutually exclusive terms. To the extent that this piece is humorous, that
humor is found in the contrast between the representation of the large
120  A Private Public Sphere
figure and that of the small male nudes who seem to have no recognition
of the threat that looms over them, a threat to which many of the figures
turn their backs.
The Mouse’s Tale’s larger collaged image of the male body, presented
in a context of capital punishment and capitalism, is one of horror. The
body is crouched down low with one arm raised, hands open, and fin-
gers splayed. The other hand is raised to the mouth, as if to stifle a
scream or cry. Only by ignoring both the symbolically charged power
of the images chosen to create this collage—including the lion, monkey,
and clowns that form the gallows, and the refinery on which the man
crouches—and the content of Carroll’s poem, both of which refer to is-
sues of state control and capital punishment, can one interpret this work
as one with light intentions.
The title, The Mouse’s Tale, is a calligram taken from Alice’s Adven-
tures in Wonderland. It is a homophonic pun: it appears on the page of
the book (as it does in the paste-up) in a serpentine curve, taking the
shape of the mouse’s tail, as it tells the mouse’s tale. The poem appears in
the lower left corner of the paste-up, in the center of the noose formed by
the clowns’ heads. Its importance within the larger work is multiple: it is
both formally and thematically influential to Jess’s paste-up. Formally,
the calligram takes on a shape that mimics its subject: the mouse’s tale is
in the shape of a tail of a mouse. Just as in the text of the poem, which
proposes to tell the mouse’s “tale,” a tale which then has little relation to
the greater story that is going on at the time, the choice of the title The
Mouse’s Tale implies—through the homophone—a type of narrativity
in a piece that seems to resist it. Rather than presenting a linear progres-
sion, its sense of time, created by its collage of images, is stagnated: it
may take place over a fraction of a second or an eternity. Similarly, the
paste-up uses the small images of a multitude of (nude) men to form one
large (equally nude) man. The inclusion of other images—the anatom-
ical images (the body abstracted), the artist, the priest, and other men
and women—provides evidence that the nudity of the male figures is not
the end of the bodily references, though the male body is loaded with
significance here, as it is both sexually specific and generalized to stand
in for the vulnerable individual. While nudity tends to be interpreted
either comically or sexually by contemporary viewers, I would contend
that Jess here is using nudity as a means of abstracting the body. Though
issues of sexuality are important to this piece, it is, I argue, foremost
one that documents the harrowing experiences of the vulnerable indi-
vidual in post-World War II society. This is the fate of the modern liberal
subject without the protection of the household’s mystery. It echoes in
obverse form the “politics of human freedom in excess” that Barrett
Watten reads in Jess’s more typical paste-ups (20); in The Mouse’s Tale,
we see what happens when that freedom is absent. The fact that the bod-
ies in question are nude and nearly nude men, in semi-provocative poses,
 A Private Public Sphere  121
invites the reading that this is a piece about gay liberation politics, and
it certainly is. The vulnerable position of gay men in the United States
during the Cold War—the Lavender Scare being one example—is a limit
case of the vulnerability of all citizens before the state. 27
Jess’s choice of Carroll’s “Mouse’s Tale” chimes thematically with the
paste-up’s images: the calligram likewise wrestles with the question of
the viability of the individual when faced with the overwhelming power
of the state, or with any power who can be judge, jury, and executioner
over him. Auping has claimed that “Many of Jess’s works are language
machines that translate objects or images from one medium to another”
(“Solar Systems” 21), a claim that seems particularly resonant with The
Mouse’s Tale’s use of the material from Carroll. In this “Mouse’s Tale,”
“Fury,” a dog, wants to exercise his power as a relief from boredom:
“We must have a trial:/ For really this morning I’ve nothing to do.” The
mouse’s protestations that “Such a trial, dear Sir,/ With no jury or judge,
would be wasting our breath,” and that it would be outside the realm
of the law, and therefore have no legal standing, are met with derision,
for the mouse has misunderstood the entire purpose of the trial. In his
(strangely) rational vehemence, Fury is not concerned with due process,
but rather the exercise of absolute power: “‘I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,’….
‘I’ll try the whole case, and condemn you to death.’” Whether or not the
proposed trial will have legal standing will be somewhat beside the point
after the execution. The fact that there is no crime is an objection that
never occurs to the mouse. He understands all too well that his crime
is his very existence, and that therefore guilt is implicit, and innocence
must be proved. This is the impossible task. The horror of the main fig-
ure in the paste-up is that of the individual who comes face to face with
his own vulnerability (his nudity) in the shadow of the state, a world
where—as a gay man—his very existence may be a crime. The Mouse’s
Tale provides a literal, visual interpretation of Warner’s statement and
warning about counterpublics: “One enters at one’s own risk.”
The juxtaposed images of the paste-up—in particular, that of the
­gallows—reflect as well on state power, the power over life and death.
The piece catches the modern liberal subject at the moment of recogni-
tion of subjugation to the state:

Caught in his confrontation with some greater power, he turns away

from the viewer, perhaps in self-horror, perhaps unaware that his
body is a swarm of Lilliputian exhibitionists…. Beside the nude
stands a monkey gallows. Surveying the world, a cat/lion, symbol
of empire, is the knot of the rope as well as the judge and jury. If the
man is found guilty, he’ll be hanged by a rope of clowns. Do these
soft old spirits say, Your death is a joke? The gray universe is already
condemned, already hanging in the gaudy noose.
(Glück 119)
122  A Private Public Sphere
Underpinning the power of the state is that of commerce, figured by
the oil refinery. Man as an embodied, sexual being is brought to the
realization of his own powerlessness against, and his complicity with,
these overwhelming forces. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
famously describes the public execution as having

a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momen-

tarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted…. Its aim is not so much
to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, at its extreme point,
the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the
law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength…. The
ceremony of punishment, then, is an exercise of “terror”.
(48–9)

This exercise in terror is so complete that the sovereign need not appear
in the image; the gallows alone is sufficiently powerful to elicit the re-
quired reaction. Clowns, monkey, and lion form a garishly colored mock-­
comical circus of jury/audience for the execution. This image is far from
the Habermasian ideal of the public sphere, as a place where, “private
persons whose identity is formed in the privacy of the conjugal domestic
family… enter into rational-critical debate around matters common to
all by bracketing their embodiment and status” (Warner 57). The main
figure’s nudity makes impossible the “bracketing” of his status, embodied
through his presence. Even the idea of the counterpublic is unimaginable:
those strutting figures have no self-awareness, nor are they aware enough
of each other to form a community but rather seem condemned to play
out their existence physically close to each other yet utterly separated.

*****

The collage technique Jess uses in his paste-ups allows allusions and
references to accrue until they form a thick web (much as Duncan de-
scribed his grand collage), which can impede a full understanding of
the work. In art historical terms, the reference that is the closest to the
­surface—and the closest chronologically—of the collage of multiplied
and ­amalgamated bodies that forms the largest single image in The
Mouse’s Tale is to Surrealist photography. Michael Auping argues that

[t]he Paste-Ups bear an obvious relationship to surrealist photomon-

tage…. Like [Max] Ernst, Jess uses metaphor… to operate outside
the realm of ordinary descriptive meaning, creating structures that
are often ironic and paradoxical. In surrealist collage and photo-
montage, as well as in the “Paste-Ups,” combined metaphors be-
come a vehicle for the expression of emotions that challenge logic by
courting the fantastic and the irrational.
(“Jess: A Grand Collage” 47–8)
 A Private Public Sphere  123
The crucial formal difference between Surrealist photography and Jess’s
paste-ups is that many of these Surrealist works did not use collage but
rather darkroom effects to create distortions in the (female) body. They
worked to create “real” images of an unreal world. By taking purport-
edly realist photographs and combining them in fanciful or nightmarish
ways to form a collage, Jess, in effect, created unreal images of the “real”
world, using collage as a tool for political critique. 28
Many of Jess’s later collages were certainly influenced by Max Ernst,
as Auping suggests, and through him, a pseudo-Victorian aesthetic,
combining their multitude of images in fanciful ways which could be de-
scribed as sentimental if they were presented straightforwardly. 29 The-
matically and formally, though, The Mouse’s Tale is a different type of
work altogether from Ernst’s collages; it is more properly related to the
emblematic function of allegory than to metaphor. The simplistic nature
of the representations in traditional allegory may be the reason this work
has been identified as a light one. But allegory can be a powerful tool
in the work of social or political critique. The use of a modified form
of medieval allegory was introduced in the 1930s by John Heartfield,
a member of the Berlin Marxist circle that included Bertolt Brecht and,
in a minor way, Walter Benjamin, whose study of allegory, translated
into English as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977), was in
dialogue with Heartfield’s photomontages. For Benjamin, the relation-
ship between juxtapositional collage forms and allegory was a vital one:
“montage is the principle formal method of both surrealism and allegory
as well as finally of his own work” (Golston 38). Heartfield’s photo-
montages maintained the traditional form of the allegorical emblem: the
image surrounded by inscriptio (title) and subscriptio (caption), which
made “the image function as a form of moral and political instruction”
(Buck-Morss 60). In Jess’s work, the title and caption are one: the calli-
gram from Carroll gives the work its title and also forms its elongated
caption, providing legibility to its meditation on state power.
Though Jess’s paste-ups are undoubtedly indebted to some aspects
of Surrealism, there is another, more ancient art historical precedent,
which strengthens its connection to the religious origins of allegory. The
presence of many teeming near-naked bodies in a compressed space re-
calls the scenes of the damned on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. How-
ever, unlike Michelangelo’s sinners, the men of The Mouse’s Tale do not
understand their damnation—they do not repent because they do not
recognize their sins. A more thorough elaboration of what that sin might
be is made in a passage from a later work by Foucault, in which the con-
nection between sexuality and the death penalty is made:

As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its

reason for being… made it more and more difficult to apply the
death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by
putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain,
124  A Private Public Sphere
and to multiply life, to put this life in order?…. Hence capital pun-
ishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enor-
mity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his
incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One has the right to kill
those who represent a kind of biological danger to others.
(History of Sexuality 137–8)

When the state views itself as needing to “ensure, sustain, and to mul-
tiply life,” those who engage in non-procreative sexuality infringe on
those imperatives. Thus, they can be transformed into the monstrous
criminals who must be exterminated for the public welfare, much as
Fury’s response to the mouse connotes in Carroll’s poem. 30
If we recall Jess’s insistence that his paste-up is about “innocent beauty
as opposed to macho bodybuilding,” it becomes clear that the “sinners”
themselves are not without blame. The ideal of innocent beauty entails
not just physical youth and the beauty presumed to go along with it, but
what might be termed a purity of spirit as well. Duncan writes about
Jess’s philosophy of art that it means to be

profoundly senti-mental…. In the division into “mind” and “spirit” in

our common speech, we have allowed “mind” to spiritless businesses
of professional interest only, and yet we keep alive another sense of
mind, for we speak of minding what we do. “I do mind,” we say
when we are deeply concerned. And the assemblage of the meaning of
“spirit” includes for us the lively tone of a spirited horse, the verve of
a Sargent water colour, the surge of alcohol, the aweful presentation
of a spook or the presiding command of the Sanctus Spiritus.
(“Art of Wondering” 325–6)

What Duncan describes as the “senti-mental”—the connection between

mind and spirit, logic and emotion—is missing in the world of The
Mouse’s Tale. The sinners are condemned through the absolute power
of law over the individual but cannot be saved from their damnation
due to their loss of “senti-ment,” which allowed the imbalance of power
in the first place. They are thus complicit in their own damnation. A
prelapsarian sexuality, not ashamed or condemning of the body and its
sexual functions, nor complicit in the commodification of sexuality (like
the images of “macho bodybuilders” from physique magazines are), is
missing from this world. This disconnection among mind, body, and
spirit is a direct result of the Cold War household, with its “separate
sphere” of private life segregated from the “real world.”
Jess’s political critique of the failure of the “separate spheres” model of
the household, magnified by Cold War containment culture, to protect
the individual adequately is echoed by one final historical allusion: the
greater body that is made up of smaller bodies is a reference to Thomas
 A Private Public Sphere  125
Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). The famous illustration of the Leviathan is
an image of a serene absolute monarch whose body is composed of the
smaller bodies of his subjects, faceless as they face him. In this concep-
tual scheme, the ruler is the head of the body politic, while the teaming
masses form the other, laboring parts. The individual is utterly pow-
erless before the state. According to Hobbes, this is a good thing, as
it wards off the total chaos of war, where man’s life is “nasty, brutish,
and short.” Duncan’s poem “Dante Etudes: The Household” provides a
counter to Hobbes’s version of social arrangements31:

The household   to provide shelter

and to prepare its members
  to live well   even
in atonality setting free
  rearrangement of atonement,
daily new keys in dreams,
  reappearance of the “home”
  note in the melody
(ll. 1–8)

In Duncan’s view, community was formed around the hearth; its basic
unit was the household, whose members were linked through practical
responsibilities, shared living space, and sexual pleasure. This smallest
possible community protected citizens from the “nasty, brutish, and
short” existence of the larger world. The falsified “communities” of the
greater world—whether political action committees, localities, states, or
nations—are placed in contrast to the family unit, encased by the home.
A Mouse’s Tale becomes the nightmare version of what happens to the
individual, faced with state power and unprotected from its dominant
narratives by the hidden recesses of communitarian or familial life.

*****

The Mouse’s Tale shows what may happen to the vulnerable individual, left
exposed without the protection of the household, due to a failure to grapple
with the repressed material of the uncanny. Freud’s essay on the uncanny
describes this phenomenon in several ways, including as something fright-
ening in its unfamiliarity because it has been repressed. When Jess describes
The Mouse’s Tale as his attempt to “reuse the recurrent images that would
jump out at [him],” the emphasis on repetition points the way to the rela-
tionship between the uncanny and his paste-up (Auping, “Interview with
Jess” 25). According to Freud, a second significant aspect of the uncanny is

the dominance in the unconscious mind of a “compulsion to re-

peat”… a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure
126  A Private Public Sphere
principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic
character…. [W]hatever reminds us of this inner “compulsion to re-
peat” is perceived as uncanny.
(238)

This insistent return of the repressed can be seen in the large male figure,
composed of many smaller figures. He seems either pregnant with them,
as if his body is overrun with these images of preening manhood, or a
host to lice or parasites infesting his body. The juxtaposed images of
The Mouse’s Tale, once recalled, must be repeated compulsively, beyond
what is pleasurable, lending it the “daemonic character” that Freud pos-
its. One aspect of what Freud describes as uncanny has to do with the
question of whether a particular being is alive or dead: dolls, automata,
and severed limbs can all have this quality. In the same way, the collaged
nudes of The Mouse’s Tale take on the character of mannequins, given
enough observation; their images are repeated so often that they assume
a state of unreality. The repetition—and thus the instigation of the sense
of the uncanny—is an essential strategy in The Mouse’s Tale’s critical
allegory, created by Jess’s collage technique. Later in the same interview
quoted earlier, Jess states that,

I am interested in the path of the image… Robert and I would often

discuss a particular image from reading or television and follow its
line back in time using our library here. We would be fascinated by
how the imagination travels through time, the image being a con-
stant vehicle.
(Auping, “Interview with Jess” 25)

The recurrence of images through time is precisely what Freud points to

in his lengthy discussion of why we find certain literary works leave us
with an uncanny feeling. The discomforting sensation purposefully in-
cited is one that becomes a warning: these repressed or forgotten images
need to be remembered. The work’s intentionally provoked discomfort
requires the viewer to question these images’ recurrence, and not to al-
low for their consumption or dismissal. The insistence on recalling the
images that society wants to forget is what collage offered to both these
artists: room for the dark places and recurring images to remain hidden
and yet present.

*****

Jess’s 1965 portrait of Duncan, entitled The Enamord Mage, was part
of his “Translations” series; it was “translated” from a photograph the
artist had previously taken of the poet. In this portrait, the subject gazes
intently into a mirror (Figure 3.2). Before him is a bookshelf holding the
 A Private Public Sphere  127

Figure 3.2  J ess (Burgess Franklin Collins), American, 1923–2004. The Enamord
Mage: Translation #6, 1965 Oil on canvas mounted on plywood 24
1/2 × 30 in. (62.2 × 76.2 cm) Foundation Purchase. Gift of a grateful
Board of Trustees in honor of Harry S. Parker III, Director of the Fine
Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1987–2005 2005.87.

books of the Gnostic library cited in “Passages 9.” The work’s title is
derived from Duncan’s poem in The Opening of the Field, “The Ballad
of the Enamord Mage,” a rhapsodic love poem, praising the lover who
magically makes all nature come to life, and gives meaning to the works
of the writer: “I, late at night, facing the page/ writing my fancies in a
literal age” (ll. 29–30).32 The need and desire for fancy—for magic—in
a literal age is one of the recurring images that Duncan and Jess both
cannot and do not desire to escape.
What makes these motivated escapes fascinating is that neither was
a flight from “reality” but rather from the manufactured forgetfulness
and cultural amnesia—and from a blindness to the results of societal
actions—that were an integral part of the story that Cold War con-
tainment culture tried to tell about itself. The narrative encapsulated
by the “separate spheres” Cold War household seemed to model the
128  A Private Public Sphere
Habermasian notion of the public sphere: home and work were (theo-
retically) separated from each other as well as from public life. Duncan’s
critique of this was expressed through his theorization, in poetry and
prose, of a household that encompassed all aspects of life. As well, his
escape from Cold War forgetfulness plays itself out in his insistence on
allowing language to use him as a vessel for the uncanny images of the
past. Language’s status as a shared resource of the community is an-
other way in which these images can exist in the present. Jess used the
nightmare images of disposable pop culture in his art, refusing to allow
them to slip away. By making them a part of his collage art, he preserves
the moment in time, despite its intentionally provoked discomfort. His
paste-up shows the naked, vulnerable individual, exposed before the
state. Both Duncan and Jess understood that these seemingly inconse-
quential or outdated images can (and possibly must) have a continuing
and essential relevance to the “senti-mental,” Duncan’s term describing
his utopian notion of the union of heart and mind, body and spirit. The
state of being “senti-mental” can only be achieved alongside this insis-
tent repetition and accretion of past images; its absence from our world
is the cost of the Cold War culture of forgetting.

Notes
1 This is much as Friedan found with the housewives laboring under the “fem-
inine mystique”: none felt adequate to the “ideal” of the “happy housewife
heroine”; yet, all believed that they should feel completely satisfied with their
work in the home. Friedan’s book is, in part, an analysis of precisely how
this “story” of the apolitical home as oasis became so dominant through the
intervention of women’s magazines.
2 Their cohabitation began significantly before the Stonewall riots, which
took place in June of 1969 and are traditionally used as the marker for
the beginning of the gay liberation movement. To say that their particular
household did not conform to the typical Cold war family is, naturally, an
understatement.
3 “Over almost four decades, until Duncan’s death in 1988, a remarkable sym-
biosis developed between Jess and Duncan. Duncan’s poems inspired Jess’s
art, which in turn suggested ideas for some of Duncan’s texts. D ­ uncan’s col-
lection of philosophy, literature, and poetry books contributed significantly
to a household filled floor-to-ceiling with books, paintings, sculptures,
and classical records” (Auping, “Jess: A Grand Collage” 39). See Fredman
88–9, for more extensive information about Duncan and Jess’s home, as
well as James Boaden’s “Moving Houses: Jess and Robert Duncan’s Queer
Domesticity.”
4 According to Miriam Nichols, “Unlike Olson, who developed some of his
most cogent statements of poetics by way of rejecting the cultural ‘western
box’ from Plato forward, Duncan rejects nothing. Instead he reinvents the
meaning of the box” (101).
5 Duncan’s sense of the “aliveness” of the past for an understanding of the
present, and of the power that ancient images may have, is very reminiscent of
Walter Benjamin’s theories of the dialectical image, though his poetic practice
was much more closely influenced by the Poundian ideogrammic method.
 A Private Public Sphere  129
6 Since the publication of The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Lever-
tov, Albert Gelpi and Robert Bertholf’s immense 896-page volume of the
correspondence between the two poets, there has been a relative embarrass-
ment of riches in critical publications on Duncan, much of which is related
to the Duncan/Levertov correspondence. The companion volume, Robert
Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry,
contains Anne Dewey’s essay, “Poetic Authority and the Public Sphere of
Politics in the Activist 1960s: The Duncan–Levertov Debate,” whose atten-
tion to public sphere theory mirrors my own. Stephen Fredman’s Contextual
Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art contains the
only other (published) reading of Duncan’s “Passages 9: The Architecture.”
Eric Keenaghan’s chapter on Duncan from his Queering Cold War Poetry
similarly reads Duncan’s focus on the “household” against a Cold War back-
drop. Likewise, G. Matthew Jenkins’s Poetic Obligation, Daniel Kane’s We
Saw the Light and Norman Finkelstein’s On Mount Vision all feature exten-
sive chapter-long (or more) readings of Duncan’s work.
7 All citations from Duncan’s prose writings in this chapter are from Robert
Duncan: Collected Essays and Other Prose.
8 While Duncan’s discussion of the “homosexual cult” was concerned with the
then-necessary sequesteredness of the group from the “general” ­public, his
citation of a specific use of language (camp) as a way of designating the “ho-
mosexual cult” seems to anticipate—and perhaps even further e­ laborate—
the key insight into Warner’s description of the counterpublic of gender and
sexuality, which, he says, are
scenes of association and identity that transform the private lives they
mediate. Homosexuals can exist in isolation; but gay people or queers
exist by virtue of the world they elaborate together, and gay or queer
identity is always fundamentally inflected by the nature of that world. …
These counterpublics, though based around aspects of life that are puta-
tively “private,” necessarily invoke aspects of public life. Participating in
such a counterpublic, whose “protocols of discourse and debate remain open
to affective and expressive dimensions of language,” necessarily blurs the
neatly segregated borders among home/ economy/government/public sphere.
The members of such a group “make their embodiment and status at least
partly relevant in a public way by their very participation” (“Public and
­Private” 57).
9 Perhaps the passage of time allows Duncan to be as politic and sanguine
as he is in the 1959 note #3, in which he describes John Crowe Ransom’s
post-acceptance rejection of Duncan’s “Towards an African Elegy” (later
published as “An African Elegy”), in the wake of the publication of “The
Homosexual in Society.”
10 In the introduction to his volume Bending the Bow (1968), he defines grand
collage in terms of relative darkness, obscurity, and conceptuality:
In the poem this very lighted room is dark, and the dark alight with
love’s intentions. It is striving to come into existence in these things, or,
all striving to come into existence is It—in this realm of men’s languages
a poetry of all poetries, grand collage, I name It, having only the imme-
diate event of words to speak for It. The gnostics and magicians claim to
know or would know Its real nature, which they believe to be miswritten
or cryptically written in the text of the actual word. But Williams is
right in his no ideas but in things; for It has only the actual universe in
which to realize Itself. We ourselves in our actuality, as the poem in its
130  A Private Public Sphere
actuality, its thingness, are facts, factors, in which It makes Itself real.
Having only these actual words, these actual imaginations that come to
us as we work.
(298)

Note that “It” is also the manner in which Gnostics typically refer to their
version of God.
11 All citations from The Collected Later Poems and Plays of Robert Duncan.
“Passage 1: Tribal Memories” is reprinted on pp. 305–7.
12 Robert Bertholf, in his article “Into the Serial Form of ‘The Regulators,’”
identifies Robert Graves’s The White Goddess as being a key source for
Duncan’s composition of this poem.
13 Duncan later ceased numbering the poems of “Passages,” in order to empha-
size this “unbounded” quality: he saw them as not having a predetermined
order for reading. There is a “syntax” to the larger work that disintegrates,
just as the grammatical syntax breaks down within each individual poem.
The large black dots are intended to indicate a pause longer than the typical
one at the end of a line.
14 The importance of the speaking voice here is one of the ways in which
­Duncan’s poetry can be more properly described as Romantic than modern.
15 The act of reading in Gnosticism can allow one access to a sudden under-
standing or knowledge; this is similar to the enlightenment available from
both the ideogram and the dialectical image.
16 This idea of the “World Egg” is taken from ancient Greek lore, attributed to
Orpheus.
17 The repetition of the ovoid shape as a symbol recalls a similar use in
­Marianne Moore’s “Marriage”; the implied perfection and closure of such a
system is similarly problematized in Moore’s work.
18 This is the type of palimpsestic collage image I termed “ply over ply” in
Chapter 1.
19 It is perhaps not surprising that both Duncan and Jess had vexed, compli-
cated relations with their immediate families, and these familial relations
influenced both of their attitudes toward their household together and
their artwork. Perhaps most strikingly, Duncan’s (adopted) father, Edward
­Symmes, was an architect. (He worked primarily on public works projects
and not private homes; for instance, he assisted in the building of the San
Francisco Palace of Fine Arts and worked on many projects associated with
the building of Yosemite National Park.) Duncan’s father’s profession was
inextricably wound up for him with his ideas about fatherhood, masculin-
ity, and his own sexuality. Though he was much closer to his mother, who
provided both emotional and financial support throughout his life (until
her death), his father—perhaps because of his remoteness, both due to his
personality and his early death at the age of 52 when Duncan was still a
teenager—assumed the role of “Father/Architect” in some of his early writ-
ings. For instance, see these lines from, “A Sequence of Lines for H.D.’s
Birthday,” “Father who is architect of the eternal city/ help me to deliver my
share of your image” (109). Or, from “Apprehensions,” “Sage Architect, you
who awaken/ the proportions and scales of the soul’s wonder…” (128). As a
young man, Duncan felt that he was being groomed to follow in his father’s
footsteps; that he named his most significant long poem, “Passages,” (a term
both poetic and architectural) must resonate with the conflict he felt toward
his father’s profession and his role as a son.
  Jess, whose given name was Burgess Collins, was likewise to abandon a
more practical career in favor of art: he studied chemistry as a young man,
 A Private Public Sphere  131
both while in the Army and afterward, and worked on the Manhattan proj-
ect (later for General Electric), producing and monitoring the production
of plutonium. Already a weekend painter, he quit science in favor of art
after having what he later referred to as “the dream” in 1949: he dreamed
that the earth would be destroyed in the year 1975 in a nuclear holocaust.
(Duncan and Jess shared a belief in the importance of dreams. Duncan had
a recurrent dream that he termed the “Atlantis dream,” the content of which
is largely recorded in his important poem, “Often I am Permitted to Return
to a Meadow.”)
  No longer wishing to have any small part in such destruction, and choos-
ing to spend what time he had left in what he deemed a more worthy pur-
suit, he became a painter full-time, using the G.I. bill to fund his education.
Though he had an aunt who, as a child, taught him how to make collages
from magazine and other household materials, his family was not supportive
of his pursuit of art full-time, nor of his homosexuality and family relation-
ship with Duncan. The fact that he chose to abandon his last name (while
Duncan changed his last name to that of his biological father) indicates the
distance that he felt from his immediate family.
  The biographical information here is derived from Lisa Jarnot’s biogra-
phy, Robert Duncan: the Ambassador from Venus.
20 All citations of “Passages 9: The Architecture” from Robert Duncan: The
Collected Later Poems and Plays. “Passages 9” is reprinted on pp. 319–21.
21 Critics such as Stephanie Coontz, Wini Breines, Joanne Meyerowitz, and
George Lipsitz have provided needed critiques as well as additional research
to more accurately fill out the picture that Friedan portrays of the situa-
tion of American women during the Cold War. Coontz, in particular, in
her chapter, “African-American Women, Working Class Women, and the
Feminine Mystique,” in A Strange Stirring: American Women and the Fem-
inine Mystique at the Dawn of the 1960s, usefully complicates the Friedan’s
research on the “happy housewife heroine” by introducing similar sociolog-
ical work focusing on African American and working class women of the
same age during the same time period. None of these studies considers a
household like that of Duncan and Jess. Such a family was, it would seem,
unthinkable to the researchers of the time.
22 Rachel Blau du Plessis’s article, “Polymorphous Poetics: Robert Duncan’s H.
D. Book” provides an excellent context to Duncan’s understanding of Freud
vis-à-vis both his intense mentorship with H. D. and his friendship with
Norman O. Brown.
23 Freud devotes a considerable amount of space in this brief essay to one par-
ticular type of “uncanny” event: the fear of the loss of the eye, and by ex-
tension, the fear of castration, the two of which he argues are inextricably
linked. By implication here, and more explicitly elsewhere (for instance, in
the Schreber case (“Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account
of a case of paranoia (dementia paranoides)”)), Freud develops a chain of
association by which the fear of castration becomes the fear of becoming
feminized, or a woman, which becomes the fear of being homosexual (or,
to be more precise, the fear of being penetrated). One could pull out the
facets of this chain from his explication of E. T. A. Hoffman’s story, “The
Sand Man” quite easily enough, as the protagonist’s fear of loss of vision
reemerges not only at the moment when he is in danger of losing his female
loves (Olympia, Clara) but also his male ones (his father (in various guises),
as well as his friend, who happens to be Clara’s brother).
24 See Auping, “Solar Systems,” for a detailed description of Jess’s working
process in making the paste-ups.
132  A Private Public Sphere
25 Jess’s later projects revolved around his plans for a large-scale painting of
the Narcissus story, to be entitled Narkissos, which was never completed.
His “Translations” series was an attempt to learn how to paint figuratively
in preparation for completing Narkissos; Jess had started his career as
an abstract-expressionist painter, and then moved on to the paste-ups. In
order to learn the skills of figurative painting at a relatively advanced age,
he completed a series of paintings in which he “translated” found images
from other formats (mostly photographs) into paintings. The Enamord
Mage(1965) (discussed at the end of this chapter), which is a painting of
Duncan in their home, is part of this series; it was translated from a photo-
graph, and from one of Duncan’s poems with the same title. “Salvages” is a
series of paintings that Jess completed on canvases that had previously been
painted on, either by himself early in his career, or by others (purchased
at thrift shops). These works were all initially completed as a type of exer-
cise in preparation for Narkissos but eventually became full blown works in
their own right. Narkissos was originally planned as a three-part process:
first, it would be “pasted-up” from found images, then a drawing would
be completed of the paste-up, and then the drawing would be translated
into a painting. However, Jess eventually stopped working on the project in
1993 after completing the drawing. His interest in the project waned after
­Duncan’s death in 1988.
26 The small male figures appear to be culled from what were known as “phy-
sique” magazines, a common source of sexually titillating material in an age
in which obscenity laws could be strictly enforced. According to J­ onathan
Katz, curator of the Smithsonian exhibit “Hide/Seek,” these images are
from “posing strap magazines,” which used water-soluble ink so that the
straps could be wiped away with a dampened fingertip, providing fully nude
images without violating obscenity laws (35).
27 The term “Lavender Scare” refers to the persecution of gay people working
for the Federal government in the post-World War II era. “Lavender Scare”
is meant to recall the term “Red Scare” as the threat of Communist infil-
tration was intentionally conflated with that of homosexuality. In fact, the
justification for the firing of thousands of gay employees of the government
was their alleged vulnerability to blackmail by Communist spies, who would
then, the story went, use them to obtain state secrets. There were no doc-
umented cases of this ever happening in the United States. C.f., David K.
Johnson, The Lavender Scare.
28 The Surrealist photomontage perhaps most closely related to The Mouse’s
Tale is Salvador Dalí’s The Phenomena of Ecstasy (1933). This photomon-
tage, which appeared in the journal Minotaure, shows the faces of many
women in various phases of what was supposed to be rhapsodic hysteria; a
series of human ears; some sculpted female faces (by the Catalan sculptor
Gaudí); and the faces of two men, both of whom bear a suspicious resem-
blance to the artist, much in the way that Jess included surreptitiously placed
images of himself in The Mouse’s Tale.
29 Ernst’s masterwork of Surrealist collage is Une Semaine de Bonté, a book whose
narrative is told through a series of images Ernst created out of ­Victorian-era
etchings which he cut and pasted into new relationships with each other. This
book was a favorite one in the Duncan–Jess household.
30 Likewise, in note #7 from the 1959 addendum to Duncan’s “The Homosex-
ual in Society,” he questions,
Might there be a type of social reaction to which “confession” of “witches,”
“Trotskyites,” and my confession as a “homosexual,” conform? In the
 A Private Public Sphere  133
prototype there is first the volunteered list of crimes one has committed
that anticipates the condemnation of church or party or society. Then
there is the fact that what one confesses as a social “crime” has been held
somewhere as a hope and an ideal, contrary to convention. The heretic
is guilty in his love or his righteousness because he has both the conven-
tional common mind and the imagination of a new common mind; he
holds in his own heart the adversary that he sees in the actual prosecutor.
Often there was torture to bring on the confession, but it enacted the in-
ner torture of divided mind. “Names cannot be named” I exclaim in this
essay, and perhaps akin to that felt necessity is the third phase in which
“witches” and “Trotskyites” eventually named their accomplices in her-
esy, throwing up their last allegiance to their complicity in hope.
(18)
31 Cited from Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays. The
poem is reprinted on pp. 552–5.
32 Cited from Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays. The
poem is reprinted on pp. 18–19.
4 Recycled Images

The subjects of this chapter—Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) and

Bruce Conner’s Marilyn Times Five (1968–1973)—are both disjunctive,
repetitive films created from the reediting of other, preexisting works. In
this, they are collage films, participating in and informing an aesthetics
of collage as opposed to montage. Many critics use the term “montage”
(rather than collage) when referring to the use of explicit juxtaposition
in film.1 When it comes to the medium of film, this distinction is import-
ant. A difficulty arises in any attempt to discuss collage in the context of
film, imbedded in the very form of the medium. All film is literally made
up of “montage,” in the specific sense of the material linking together
of a succession of still images. What we now think of as montage is one
particularly condensed type of filmic sequence that makes evident leaps
in temporal or narrative continuity. Contemporary film viewers are con-
stantly expected to make such leaps in order to keep up with the narra-
tive of the film. In this, a material reality of filmmaking becomes imbued
with narrative convention—and, to precisely that extent, montage may
be not at all unrelated to a more standard or expected series of shots
that can reinforce or bolster narrative rather than disrupting it. As I dis-
cussed in Chapter 1, theorists of the classical Hollywood cinema regard
the montage sequence as a key technique to forward film narrative. 2 I
privilege the term collage rather than montage in this chapter because
the force of the latter often results in a progression or a “leading-up-to”
of an event. In conventional, narrative film, it is often used in order
to move through time or events rapidly, or to make something quickly
apparent that could not be shown easily—or at all—through standard
narration, whether for reasons of audience interest or censorship (con-
sider, for instance, the clichéd example of a montage of trains running
through tunnels, rushing water, etc. to substitute for an image of explicit
sexuality). I contend that collage film (as opposed to a standard mon-
tage sequence) forcefully and purposefully disrupts narrative continuity
through its juxtapositional techniques and that, at least for the films
under consideration here, it does so in order to critique sociopolitical
conditions—specifically, in these films, the gendered relations—of con-
temporary American society. Both films discussed here feature almost
 Recycled Images  135
exclusively the images of a single woman, and each severely distorts the
intent of its source film in order to make a powerful comment on female
images and political, historical, and aesthetic image-making. ­Employing
collage to recall film’s exhibitionistic history, Cornell and Conner, in
very different ways, expose the insidious narratives that commercial cin-
ema tells about women.3
Collage does not imply a linear progression or hierarchy as such (first
one thing and then another happens), but rather the collaged elements
are put into play on an equal plane with each other. In the plastic arts,
collage implies simultaneity of perception: ideally, a viewer perceives all
elements of the collage more or less at once. In writing, collage fosters a
syntactical relation between heterogeneous elements that emphasizes the
“showing” rather than the “telling” in a way that tends to work against
the grain of narrative or rhetoric. While simultaneity may not be mate-
rially possible in a film, a desire for something similar to this experience
informs the work of collage filmmakers. As Sergei Eisenstein said in his
essay, “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,”

Each sequential element [still image of film] is perceived not next

to the other, but on top of the other. For the idea (or sensation) of
movement arises from the process of superimposing on the retained
impression of the object’s first position, a newly visible further posi-
tion of the object. This is, by the way, the reason for the phenome-
non of spatial depth, in the optical superimposition of two planes in
stereoscopy. From the superimposition of two elements of the same
dimension always arises a new, higher dimension….
In another field, a concrete word (denotation) set beside a concrete
word yields an abstract concept—as in the Chinese and Japanese
languages, where a material ideogram can indicate a transcendental
(conceptual) result.
The incongruence in contour of the first picture—already impressed
on the mind—with the subsequently perceived second picture en-
genders, in conflict, the feeling of motion. Degrees of incongruence
determine that tension which becomes the real element of authentic
rhythm.
(105; emphasis in original)

As I previously discussed in Chapter 1, though Eisenstein’s work on

montage has been transformed by the Hollywood cinema into an engine
for narrative film, this was not Eisenstein’s vision for film. The desire for
simultaneity that he articulates above features itself not only within a
strip of film being literally disrupted by cuts and sutures but also within
the fundamental convention of narrative, represented by the cinematic
texts chosen for transformation. This disruption then allows for a mo-
ment of silence, when the stories that we all are already ready to hear are
136  Recycled Images
not being told; in this moment, collage reshapes time and space, allow-
ing for a critique to be made, and for the meaning of the images that are
offered up to be, at least momentarily, unsettled.
Cinematic “moments of silence” have been increasingly rare. For the
last 100 years or more, film as a form of mass entertainment has become
closely identified with visualized narrative, a distant cousin to drama,
or the novel brought to life as a moving image. In essence, this popu-
lar form of entertainment can be summarized as a kind of equation,
where the essence of film is considered to be a series of visual images
that expresses a narrative with the aid of sound (dialogue, music, and
sound effects). It is the utter naturalization of narrative in film that I
am trying to expose. This naturalization of the narrative progression
(X happens and then, because of X, Y happens) is so complete that films
that don’t attempt to tell stories are inevitably relegated to commercial
obscurity by the terms “experimental” or “art.” This was not always
the case. As Tom Gunning and others have shown, early cinema was
inspired at least as much by less middlebrow forms of culture than the
theater and the novel; it was more akin to the sideshow, vaudeville’s
poor relation. Gunning’s term for this is the “cinema of attractions”;
he explains, “What precisely is the cinema of attractions? First it is a
cinema that bases itself on… its ability to show something” (64).4 Early
on, film took advantage of one of its singular attributes—the ability to
show things that couldn’t otherwise be seen, whether because of dis-
tance (exoticism), morality (sexuality), or the laws of time and space
(magic/special effects). Despite the naturalization of narrative in film, a
residue of the exhibitionistic impulse in the “showing” persists in several
current genres, including action/adventure, science fiction/fantasy, and
pornography. Often enough, these genres fulfill narrative expectations
only through the most thinly stretched of contrivances. Yet, this expec-
tation is so strong that filmmakers must work very hard to break away
from it, as viewers consistently attempt to re-assimilate their works into
a received sense of formal and narrative continuity. Collage breaks the
formal and narrative frames that bound works of art, and thus has been
used as a tool by those filmmakers who want to show things that can’t
ordinarily be seen.
Both the collage films I examine here—Cornell’s Rose Hobart and
Conner’s Marilyn Times Five—are composed of other films. These films
were previously recorded by someone else, and previously released as
separate, unrelated works. Thus, Cornell and Conner created their new
films through a process of reediting the previous work, removing the
dialogue (where it existed), adding a new musical accompaniment, and
imposing a new title. Both new films feature soundtracks that create a
striking juxtaposition with the film’s visual images. Because these two
collage films are largely composed of footage from one single other
source rather than from footage from multiple sources, as the majority
 Recycled Images  137
of found footage films are (often, as with Conner’s first and most fa-
mous film, A Movie (1958), many other sources), a unity of referential-
ity within the film focuses the attention of the viewer strongly onto the
previous source. As a result of this focus, the new film becomes a kind
of intertextual memory of the previous one—but it becomes a mem-
ory, like most memories, with a difference. These films also explicitly
invoke, in different ways, the idea of copy, an idea lurking behind all
­considerations of film as art.
A consideration of the “copy” in film makes clear how film problema-
tizes the idea of authenticity in a work of art, in several different regis-
ters. The medium of film denies the idea that the valuation of the artwork
­inheres in the opposition of the original versus the copy.5 Film production
processes, as well, reject the valuation of the “here and now” of human
presence observed in both the performing and plastic arts, what Walter
Benjamin termed “aura.” As Benjamin describes it in his landmark ­essay,
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological ­Reproducibility,” “as
soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic pro-
duction, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of
being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics” (25).
By releasing art from its attachment to the ritual object, one that is to
be contemplated and worshipped, technological reproduction techniques
free art to be political. Furthermore, as Benjamin continues, the effect of
film is that

the human being is placed in a position where he must operate with

his whole living person, while forgoing its aura. For the aura is
bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no facsimile of
the aura.
(31)

In here lies the fundamental ambiguity of the consideration of film as

political art and as “copy.” The loss of aura in art is a sacrifice, one that
may compensate the loss of the “here and now” of humanity with po-
litical power—but this power is free-floating, not attached to any given
politics (as Benjamin explicates in his later discussion of the aesthetici-
zation of politics in fascism).
Both Cornell’s and Conner’s films directly invoke the idea of the copy
(though in different ways, as I will discuss), foregrounding this loss of
authenticity within art, through their revision of source texts. Like many
collage artists (including Ezra Pound and Benjamin), both ­Cornell and
Conner combine experimental formal techniques with a deep skepti-
cism concerning conventional notions of progress, particularly in tech-
nological terms. Both filmmakers are convinced that the products of
mass culture—rather than being high culture’s disposable, forgettable
­detritus—have a lasting impact on the social, if not political, attitudes
138  Recycled Images
of the general populace. In an interview, Conner described his attitude
toward mass culture as such:

[A]nything which was taken for granted as not serious art, not art,
just things that are thrown away, were exactly what I paid attention
to…. [I]f you want to know what’s going on in a culture, look at
what everybody takes for granted. Put your attention on that, rather
than on what they want to show you. I view my culture here in the
United States as I would regard a foreign environment. That is, it’s
supposed to be my culture. I don’t feel that way.
(Wees 47; emphasis in original)

Conner’s emphasis on making evident what others want to dismiss is a

central aspect of his filmmaking practice, and one that is derived from
early cinema’s impulse to show.
By recalling the anti-narrative, anti-naturalistic tendencies of cinema’s
earliest days, both of these filmmakers have constructed staggeringly
original films from borrowed, copied images, and crafted incisive social
critiques using retrograde or banal material. Their excision of narra-
tive, and the cohesiveness provided by a naturalized point of view for
the images they have chosen, exposes what has been one of cinema’s
primary subjects: female bodies. Both men’s frequent choice of subject
matter has caused many critics to understand their films as (at best) a
type of love letter or fan mail to the woman in question, and (at worst) a
further ­perpetration of the type of leering voyeurism that they are trying
to expose. Within their films, the confluence of desire and commerce of
which cinema is only one example provides space in which the bodies of
women become not only commodities in themselves but also the fertile
ground for the selling of a vast array of other objects.6

*****

The first of the two collage films I will examine here, Rose Hobart,
is also the most influential early film to have been assembled entirely
from another film.7 During the first screening of the film at Julian Levy’s
eponymous New York gallery, an enraged Salvador Dalí began scream-
ing obscenities at Cornell. Dalí, who had to be physically restrained by
his wife from attacking Cornell, claimed that he had already had the
idea to create such a film—though he had never told anyone about it nor
taken any steps toward making it. “My idea for a film is exactly that,”
he told Levy, “and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay
to have it made…. I never wrote it or told anyone, but it is as if he had
stolen it” (Soloman 89).8 Cornell, who was by nature a shy and retiring
man, never fully recovered from the shock of Dalí’s reaction. After this
spectacle, he was extremely reluctant ever to show his films in public.
 Recycled Images  139
Whether true or false, Dalí’s conviction that Cornell had somehow pene-
trated his mind and stolen his thoughts makes this anecdote all the more
apropos to the film itself: Rose Hobart’s collage dissects and reorganizes
its source film—the early talkie, East of ­Borneo (1931)—removing most
of the scenes that do not feature the eponymous star, Rose Hobart, and
most of the original film’s plot along with them. Rose Hobart returns
over and over again to Hobart’s face and its exaggerated expressions:
laughing, grimacing, frowning, smirking, and scowling. According to
Catherine Fowler, “Cornell’s extraction of Rose Hobart renders her not
only outside of narrative but also outside of time,” and with no respect
for Aristotelian continuities of plot, time, or action, Cornell rearranges
the film and cuts between scenes in a manner that goes beyond what
would typically be termed abrupt (233). For instance, the viewer may en-
ter a scene just as it is fading out, or see a shot from one scene, and then
a reverse shot taken from another. This “assertive editing” technique
(as Annette Michelson termed it) has led many critics to call the film
“rough” or otherwise imply that Rose Hobart, while admittedly original,
is, in some sense, the work of an amateur (“Rose Hobart and M ­ onsieur
Phot” 54).9 However, such descriptions, entirely biased toward the ex-
pectation of narrative and a cohesive point of view that ­Hollywood film
has instilled in viewers, fail to appreciate the sophisticated series of for-
mal disruptions that constitute the collage Cornell created out of East
of Borneo.10 These include changes in the narrative, editing, speed, tint,
and music of the original, and the value of each of these changes can best
be assessed by reviewing the material that Cornell had to work with,
the original version of East of Borneo. One source of critical confusion
regarding Cornell’s collage of the earlier film stems from the notion that
East of Borneo was without any redeeming value, that it was trash even
before Cornell found it. While the film was indeed “trash” in the sense
that Cornell acquired his copy by buying film footage sold by the pound,
as a piece of cinema, it also sustains a degree of interest in its own right,
largely for its cultural context rather than its aesthetic or formal value.
Viewing East of Borneo as the source text for the collage of Rose Hobart
and, in particular, analyzing the original narrative open up the content of
Rose Hobart as a work of sociopolitical critique through its intertextual
relations to East of Borneo and, through that film, to other colonialist nar-
ratives, as well as through its use of techniques borrowed from early cin-
ema. The plot of East of Borneo, once the genders of the main characters
have been reversed, bears a strong resemblance to that of Joseph C ­ onrad’s
Heart of Darkness (1899).11 This comparison can supply some of the colo-
nial context for both the plot of East of Borneo and those sections of the
original film retained by Cornell which stand out by dint of their lack of fit
in comparison to the majority of scenes featuring shots of Hobart.
The preponderance of views of Hobart in medium or close shots in the
film has led many commentators to presume Cornell’s only intent with
140  Recycled Images
the film to be that of making a cinematic portrait of her. While I am
in no way denying that Cornell is interested in proliferating images of
­Hobart, I would also argue that to limit one’s analysis of the film in such
a way is to ignore a great deal that this film has to offer. Though there
has continued to be strong critical interest in Cornell’s work (primarily
in his boxes, from art historians), almost no criticism of Cornell’s work
has attempted to make the case that his work has an explicit relation to
the sociopolitical. Katherine Conley describes Cornell’s boxes as “oth-
erworldly” and “disconnected from world politics (although decidedly
connected to his own personal history” (273). Ellen Levy states that

there is a critique of systems of social dominance implicit in ­Cornell’s

tendency to identify himself as a feminine artist. However, in his
work that critique always remains implicit… Cornell had virtually
nothing to say about politics as such, either in art or in life.
(90)

Likewise, Bonnie Costello has argued that his boxes “show involvement
in the documentation of history as well as its transfiguration…. [H]is
‘pharmacies’ [the boxes] can… be seen as offering a cure for the world in
asserting that the possible belongs in reality along with the actual” (110).
All of these critical views are quite understandable when one looks at
­Cornell’s boxes and their consistent groupings of images (the interstellar;
female stars of the screen, stage, and ballet; birds; ­children’s toys; hotels) in
isolation; likewise, it is true that Cornell neither ­publicly ­discussed ­issues
of politics nor explicitly connected his art to them. The idea, though,
that Cornell is “otherworldly”—that his work has no connection to this
world—is one that has become the type of critical commonplace threaten-
ing to create a blindness to other possible readings of the work.
This critical blindness has often limited readings of Rose Hobart such that
Cornell is painted as a high-modernist purveyor of fan fiction: for example,
Fatimah Rony lumps Rose Hobart in with “other classic surrealist films,”
terming them all “conservative” in their representation of race and gender,
then repeating the oft-made claim that Rose Hobart “embodies a kind of in-
fatuation, or amour fou… on the part of Cornell for Hobart…” (132). This
critical short circuit with regard, in particular, to Cornell’s frequent use of
images of women stems from the complexity of the sexual politics of Cor-
nell’s work. It is far too easy to dismiss them as retrograde or even “icky”;
yet, his formal artistry is so compelling that it is in some sense no surprise
that even many admiring critics have either dismissed or brushed over them
lightly. Among the critical discussions of Cornell’s works that feature female
performers, Michael Moon has put forward a strong argument that takes
these works seriously, not relegating them to the merely voyeuristic:

Cornell’s boxes do not simply imprison the women whom they

salute, as some critics have suggested; of course, they do not
 Recycled Images  141
simply liberate them, either. Rather, they produce virtual space
in which women performers and their admirers of either gender
can phantasmatically interact in a public sphere which is other-
wise accessible to a relative few. That this public space is also a
scene of performance of sexualities, albeit sexualities shorn of
the set of stable referents in bodies and body parts which have
been ­considered to be the very guarantors of “proper” sexuali-
ties, goes a considerable ways in helping us understand why there
has been so much resistance to recognizing the complex eroti-
cism of Cornell’s boxes—why many interpreters of these eloquent
provocations to thought and desire have felt compelled to render
them mute.
(57)

Moon’s insight that it is the complexity of the sexual referents in

­ ornell’s work, and the tendency in his work for these referents to
C
ignore or deviate from typical or even “proper” boundaries, is key.
Cornell’s films (as well as his boxes) work, as I have argued, by defying
the very types of boundaries that are used to shore up not only textual
categories but also categories of gender and, as I will argue, race. Only
by paying attention to the segments of the film that do not solely fea-
ture images of Hobart can the (anti-) colonialist context for the film
come into focus.
The primitivistic narrative of East of Borneo is as simple as it is out-
landish. Linda, a wealthy white woman, attempts to find her estranged
physician husband, first in Borneo, then in the fictional kingdom of
Marudu. She discovers that he has fallen under the perverting influence
of the Prince of Marudu, who is convinced of his culture’s superiority
over those of the West, and insists that his people are descended from
the Aryans, the “oldest white race.” In attempting to save her errant
husband, she puts herself in danger of being similarly corrupted. The
other plot detail relevant to these considerations is the Prince’s avowed
mortal connection to the volcano looming over his kingdom: he believes
that the volcano will be silent as long as he lives, and when he dies
(he has no offspring), the volcano will erupt, destroying his kingdom
and all of his subjects, for whom he expresses little concern. Embedded
within the plot of East of Borneo are many of the aspects of the cinema
of attractions that have often been translated into narrative cinema. It
features an exotic locale, with the opportunity to exhibit foreign land-
scapes, wild animals, and scantily clad “natives” (largely female, though
some male as well).12 This locale centers on the volcano itself, for which
there is a dramatic unveiling scene. It also abounds with sexual intrigue
and the threat of miscegenation. The potentially scandalous relationship
between Linda (a white woman) and the Prince (a nonwhite man) is, in
the context of the 1930s, a much more dangerous one than that between
Kurtz and the priestess in Heart of Darkness. Cornell extends many
142  Recycled Images
significant remainders of the cinema of attractions into Rose Hobart.
Moreover, by excising the banalities of the plot, he creates a film that
shows itself much more straightforwardly. He removes all motives, how-
ever absurd, from the spectacles of exoticism, sexuality, and what can
be called (within the context of early cinema) magic, that appear in Rose
Hobart.13 When, at 6:05, we see a cut to the Prince as he walks over to a
window and pulls aside the drapes to reveal the volcano, his attempt to
awe and seduce Linda is transformed by Cornell into a moment of pure
spectacle.
It may be a surprise to find that Rose Hobart does have its own
sort of plot. But this too is transformed. The shift in registers of the
­narrative—from the causally motivated, extended yet flimsy plot, to a
broad reaching and curtailed plot that denies causality for the events
that take place—has several implications. Rather than narrating the
dangers of cultural and sexual miscegenation in the colonial context (in
Borneo, the white official Linda speaks to assures her that her husband
could not possibly be there as he would have known if another white
man was present), Rose Hobart depicts a story that is familiar and yet
frightening. That is to say, Cornell has taken the material of East of
Borneo and turned it into a myth, one whose content historically has
represented a great human fear: the loss of the sun.14 The few scenes
that Cornell imported from sources other than East of Borneo (from
stock footage and scientific film sources) precipitate this metamorpho-
sis. The opening shot (approximately 0:06) shows a group of people
looking skyward, as if they are viewing some celestial event, such as an
eclipse.15 At 2:07, there is a cut to Hobart on a balcony alone, looking
pensive. She walks to the end of the balcony, and looks over the edge
with interest. At 2:34, something falls into a body of water, creating a
splash in slow motion. As the water clears, a small white ball appears
in the water. At 2:47, there is a cut back to Hobart on the balcony. She
continues looking down at the water, looks to the side, then up at the
sky, with seeming trepidation. These three scenes represent the mythic
action of Rose Hobart: the sun has fallen from the sky to the earth,
and it turns out that its size is no larger than it appears to be in the
sky. This compilation of scenes recurs later in the film, between 18:09
and 18:36. The film then ends with a medium shot of Hobart, looking
down as some of the “native” men restrain her. This is the action of
Rose Hobart. Cornell has removed a majority of the racist and sexist
content of East of Borneo, but allowed enough remnants of it to remain
so that the viewer cannot help but ask questions. What, for instance,
is the import of the scene of the “native” women dancing? And why is
there a lengthy, uncut scene in the middle of the film, featuring Hobart
with a monkey and a tiger?
The section with the animals takes place between 11:26 and 12:11.
This is by far the longest single continuous section of East of Borneo
 Recycled Images  143
that Cornell includes in Rose Hobart. In it, Hobart is seen playing with
a monkey, unusually happy and serene. At 12:03, there is a cut to a tiger
making its way through the jungle. These scenes stand as outliers in the
film, both for their relative length and for their content. In the context of
East of Borneo, the scene plays out as such: Linda releases the monkey
from its lead (it had been a pet), commenting on how “these people” like
to lock things up, and the monkey scampers off to play. The tiger then
enters the scene, sees the monkey, pounces, and carries him off. ­(Cornell
excises this part of the scene.) If, in this schema, Linda represents the
vulnerable monkey who does not want to be kept prisoner, and the Prince
is the tiger who would devour her, only the crucial intervention of her
­husband, realigning the gender roles she had precariously reversed, saves
her from the Prince, the erupting volcano, and her own misguided at-
tempts at acting outside of her prescribed role. Linda transgresses her
conventional place, both as a “white woman” and a wife, in coming to
Marudu and attempting to save her husband; her actions set in motion
all of the following events, bringing death and natural disasters in her
wake.16 Her attempt to rewrite the “natural” order without the conven-
tional markers of style and usage causes the volcano to erupt, and thus
destroys Marudu. However, this remains a local, or native, event of no
concern to Linda or her husband, once they are able to escape. It is worth
noting that the narrative of East of Borneo consistently works to put the
body of Linda (Hobart) in danger, and then to allow her husband (or
other men) to rescue her. This pattern begins with the scene where Linda
is sleeping on the boat, during the voyage to Marudu. (Cornell uses this as
the opening of his film, at 0:20–0:44 and 0:53–1:38.) As she sleeps peace-
fully, a large snake menacingly moves toward her. Later, she is nearly at-
tacked by a jungle cat, by alligators, by the Prince, and finally, she causes
the volcanic eruption that destroys Marudu. Cornell removes all of these
moments from the narration, so that, in Rose Hobart, her body is no
longer associated with death and destruction. Cornell’s transformation
of the causally motivated travel/disaster/adventure narrative into myth
widens the scope of its implications. The sun’s disappearance from the
sky concerns everyone, not only the unfortunate inhabitants of Marudu.
Cornell has, in his typical style, made formally new use of the ­ancient
notion of the metamorphosis; he has made a film about metamorphosis,
and one that is achieved through metamorphosis. Ovid’s ­Metamorphoses
abounds with stories of individuals who have been transformed into
plants or animals, most as punishment for some transgression against the
gods. These can function as a straightforward prescription for day-to-day
behavior, but they can also serve another, explanatory function. That
is, they offer a rationale for events that otherwise resist ­apprehension.
Somewhat like Franz Kafka’s proto-existential “The Metamorphosis”
(1915), though less devastating in tone, Cornell’s is a myth for the middle
twentieth century, one in which the most horrible things occur for no
144  Recycled Images
ostensible reason. The sun may fall from the sky, but no one can explain
this occurrence, nor does anyone seem much to care. The clear “moral” of
Ovid’s stories often returns to one central ­message: humans should know
their place with respect to the gods; certain boundaries are not meant
to be crossed; some relationships must not be formed. ­Cornell’s artistic
method almost necessarily works against such injunctions. Speaking of
Cornell’s boxes, Deborah Soloman explains that C ­ ornell worked “in a
style that’s the height of aesthetic impurity, mingling sources from high
and low culture in defiance of lofty rules of art history” (157; emphasis
in original). Collage, as a formal practice, proceeds from the modern
notion of firm—if permeable—borders and boundaries. It is predicated
on a will to transgress boundaries; it cannot exist in the absence of such a
transgression, which juxtaposes two or more previously discrete and sep-
arate images, sounds, ideas, or things. This form of transgression is also
coded as a type of impurity, an unnatural mingling of two unlike things.
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan describes how, ­“Cornell regularly ­alluded to the
dynamics of association, ­morphing, and intersecting…. The piecing and
integrating principles of collage/assemblage… express these dynamics in
physical form” ­(“Musings” 63). Colonialist narratives are typically anx-
ious that the “superior” culture will be perverted and diluted by proxim-
ity to that of the “inferior” natives. (In East of Borneo, the twist is that
representatives of both cultures, “native” and white, are equally anxious
about this threat of impurity.) Heart of Darkness provides one aestheti-
cally powerful example; East of Borneo is another, though lesser, one.17
Any such narrative element, when cinematically present, is consciously
disrupted and refigured by Cornell’s collage. Thus, the very fears and
anxieties permeating the colonialist narrative are enacted by collage’s
formal techniques.
Colonialist anxieties about cultural purity show an uncanny simi-
larity to anxieties concerning artistic formal purity, ones that collage
similarly exposes. Collage film, as I have discussed, in particular, lays
bare the problematics of the attempt to fetishize art once of the “here
and now” of its aura has been surrendered via technological reproduc-
tion techniques. Rose Hobart, created from a copy of East of Borneo,
is much more “original” as a work of art than the “original” film, East
of Borneo. Conceptually speaking, it is a strikingly original film, but
one constructed out of a copy (of a copy of a copy…) Aura, as Benjamin
says, cannot be copied, but it was already missing from the “original”
film. Cornell’s manipulation of East of Borneo (most significantly, as I
will discuss, the soundtrack) envisions film as a work of art outside the
system of capital that had already, in the 1930s, determined most of its
constitutive range.
To do so, Cornell has, between the scenes showing the “sun’s” ­departure
from the sky, assembled clips, many very brief, virtually all of which fea-
ture Hobart: she interacts with others, though we rarely see who; walks
 Recycled Images  145
to the same places over and over again; seems to be in different places al-
most simultaneously; arrives at places where she has been for some time;
and appears to change clothes after every couple of minutes, though her
wardrobe is not extensive. As in the magic films of Georges Méliès that
he included in his collection of early film, Cornell here uses the power of
cinema to make things happen, to “show,” without a narratively derived
motivation. Because of the scenes that Cornell chose to include in the
film, and because of the manner in which he has rearranged and some-
times repeated them, a great deal of the film can stand in for other parts
of it. Thomas Lawson has argued that this formal structure

bring[s] the relationship between [the images of Hobart] into sharper

focus at the expense of the images themselves. For although repeti-
tion works as a function of memory, it is paradoxically true that it
is easier to remember a sequence of events if it is situated within a
narrative. As a result, the sequences in Rose Hobart lose their in-
dividuality, pointing instead to a latent meaning not manifest in a
catalogue of the discrete elements.
(57)

There are two important insights here about the function of the image
in the film. One is that repetition, particularly that of odd or unexpected
images (like a character coming into a room, or walking down a hall)
draws special attention to that moment of the film, inviting the question,
why this moment and no other? The other is that repetition can also
bring on boredom in the sense of an overwhelming sameness. In film and
other popular media, narrative only functions properly when it elides
some things: boring things, those that are taken for granted.18 Narrative
conspires to direct audience attention away from these moments, and
toward the “important” moments, the ones on which the plot turns.19
These two observations tend to work against each other. That is to say,
how can one pay close attention to a particular image if one cannot
differentiate it from any other image? This combination of attention to
detail with the proliferation of nearly indistinguishable images can lend
to the film an air of obsession. If East of Borneo is taken to stand in for
narrative Hollywood film in general (still then a relatively recent phe-
nomenon), Cornell’s insistence on the near-ubiquity of Hobart’s image
in the frame of Rose Hobart has understandably led many critics to
assume that his desire in its creation is erotic in nature.
When one looks past the proliferation of images of Hobart in Rose
Hobart and examines the form of the film closely, it becomes clear that
Cornell’s significant changes to the speed, tint, and soundtrack of East
of Borneo all work to transform (or metamorphose) the film into some-
thing much closer to the products of early cinema, the “silent” films from
which East of Borneo had been an early departure. As Cornell’s birth
146  Recycled Images
had nearly coincided with that of cinema, he was well acquainted with
film prior to its institutionalization as the narratively and psychologically
based product that we are familiar with today. As an avid collector of
early films, he continued to watch them at home on his own hand-crank
projector well after these films were no longer available commercially, and
thus they continued to influence his artistic practice. His metamorphosis
of East of Borneo, beyond the question of the narrative, included the fol-
lowing steps: slowing the film speed down, so that it matched that of the
standard “silent” film; removing the spoken dialogue, sound effects, and
music tracks from the film, and substituting recorded music, played as the
film was running; and showing the film through a (usually) blue tint.20
The most significant change of these three is the switch from the stan-
dard panoply of the soundtrack, including human speech, sound effects
(such as the volcanic eruption, animal noises, and the palace’s collapse),
and music, to music only. For its extreme juxtaposition to the film’s
­visual images, Cornell’s choice of music is significant. The syncopated,
playful, sometimes almost boisterous rhythms of the new soundtrack—a
record he found at a dime store, Nestor Amaral’s Holiday in Brazil—
bear no obvious (or even clear) relation to the languorous, dream-like,
at times, suspenseful images. 21 In this, Cornell again makes reference
to early cinema, not only in that various musical forms were important
to early cinema, but also in that music had previously borne a much
different relation to the images that it accompanied than that of mere il-
lustration or supplement. While the notion of music explaining the emo-
tional import of a scene or introducing a character in the early cinema is
well known (often in the context of melodrama), there were many other
formats in which music coexisted with, or even dominated, the visual
image, including the illustrated song, a very early forerunner of the mu-
sic video. 22 Cornell’s own insistence on the importance of the music to
Rose Hobart similarly puts into question assumptions about the film’s
presumed image/sound relation. His written notes for the performance
of Rose Hobart indicate that the room in which the film is to be shown
should be darkened, and the music should be played once through in its
entirety before the visual images of the film were shown. 23 Presenting
audiences with a darkened theater and playing the film’s music before
they could see its images create expectations of a certain kind of conti-
nuity between the images and the sounds. The resulting discontinuity of
the image/sound combination could well have been shocking. 24
In slowing the film speed down, and in tinting the film blue, ­Cornell
similarly makes reference to the early cinema, through the starkness of
his visual images. As he has stripped away the narrative, and produced
a soundtrack that does not “fit,” the images, in some sense, stand with-
out supplement. Narrative and music do not provide ready clues for
their interpretation, but in fact may often work against the grain of in-
terpretation. (For instance, what I’ve described as the “story” of Rose
 Recycled Images  147
Hobart—the loss of the sun—bears little obvious relation to the images
that make up the bulk of the film.) While critics agree that the blue tint
on the film generates an atmospheric effect, it also fosters the impression,
particularly given the comparatively long early sequence showing Hobart
asleep, that the entire film takes place in a dream, hers or someone else’s.
(Michael Pigott rightly asks whether “she is waking from a dream, or
waking into a dream” (77).) Since lighting requirements of early cinema
made it difficult to distinguish between daytime and nighttime shots, the
blue tint was often used to indicate that a shot was taking place at night.
By tinting his entire film blue, Cornell indicates that the film takes place
after dark, though, again, nothing in the images given would seem to
indicate this (either the actions that seem to be taking place, the clothing
worn by those on screen, or the (dis)order in which they take place). Slow-
ing the film speed to the standard rate for “silent” film has the effect for
knowledgeable viewers not only of making the reference to early cinema
more explicit, but also of putting more pointed emphasis on what has
often been described as the “nervous” or “agitated” gestures of Hobart. 25
The emphasis on gesture, the bodily part of acting, over speech is a direct
reference to early (“silent”) cinema, in which actors often developed what
now appear like overly emotive or melodramatic physical acting styles in
order to clarify both the import of a scene in the absence of dialogue and,
when intertitles are used, who is speaking, and to whom. Cornell intuited
that what beauty can be found in conventional film is largely in the image,
not “the empty roar of the sound track” (“Enchanted Wanderer” 3). The
collage essay, “Enchanted Wanderer: Excerpt from a Journey Album for
Hedy Lamarr,” in which Cornell makes this claim demonstrates that his
interest in film had little to do with the causally motivated commercial-
ized product into which narrative cinema, by 1941, had already solidified:

Among the barren wastes of the talking films there occasionally

­occur passages to remind one again of the profound and s­ uggestive
power of the silent film to evoke an ideal world of beauty, to ­release
unsuspected floods of music from the gaze of a human counte-
nance in its prison of silver light….
And so we are grateful to Hedy Lamarr, the enchanted wanderer,
who again speaks the poetic and evocative language of the silent
film, if only in whispers at times, beside the empty roar of the sound
track….
(3)

Cornell’s obvious impatience with narrative cinema—or at least, the

type of narrative cinema that had become dominant after the coming of
recorded sound—is evident here: he disparages what has become “bar-
ren” and “empty”; and celebrates invocations of the “profound,” “sug-
gestive,” “poetic,” and “evocative.” Cornell consistently associates early
148  Recycled Images
cinema with music and poetry rather than dialogic discourse and appre-
ciates nonnarrative art forms that use images, as he says, to “evoke,”
not to tell. The power of early cinema, for Cornell, was contained in
its ability to allow the viewer to create her own “story,” to associate its
images freely, through the power of her imagination, rather than having
a premade narrative thrust upon her.
Before he was known as a filmmaker, Cornell had gained a reputa-
tion for his cinematic viewing habits, as a film collector. He was a part
of the small coterie who viewed films at home, prior to the advent of
home video technology. Much of the criticism of Cornell’s films connects
his interest in cinema to his interest in famous women, those actresses
whom he would have viewed in his home cinema. His cinematic output
largely supports this observation, as much of it is focused on the images
of a lone girl/woman, who is often idealized in a way that appears si-
multaneously childlike and erotic. Yet, as I’ve discussed, a substantial
portion of the criticism makes no attempt to move beyond this obser-
vation in its analysis or evaluation of the films. Cornell’s love of cinema
was primarily a love of the image, one recalled nostalgically from the
early cinema of his youth. The image in these films—and this became
increasingly true as cinema metamorphosed into a corporate industry—
was predominantly that of a woman, presented in a sexually enticing
way. Derek Long has argued that, “The primary goal of Cornell’s editing
in Rose Hobart was not one of disruption or fragmentation…. Rather
Cornell’s recutting of East of Borneo and the found footage is an act of
reconstruction…”; and I would agree (343). In forcing East of Borneo
to metamorphose into a type of “silent” film, Cornell has exerted the
power of memory over art, and the ability of that memory to change
the present. Rose ­Hobart’s creative act is one “founded on a dissatis-
faction with something that one loves… and an attempt to redress this
imbalance through… a creative transformation of the imperfect world
into ­another that emphasizes and elongates those moments that first en-
tranced” (Pigott 68–9). For Cornell, what he had loved was the silent
cinema, and the memory at work here is not the memory of an actual
past event or an actual film but rather a memory of how Cornell wishes
the cinema could be, an idealized example of the film image as an art
form, separated from the coercive systems that link images of women to
commerce, and disrupting the too-easy narrative about women that such
systems tell. This is a kind of nostalgic utopianism that many collage
artists take part in, using the transformative power of collage to create
an ideal world out of an imagined, idealized, and never realized past.

*****

Compared to Rose Hobart, Marilyn Time Five’s source material origi-

nates at a very different point of the spectrum of mass cultural images
 Recycled Images  149
of women, and of male viewership of these images: that of the girlie or
striptease film. The girlie film is a link between the sexually explicit films
of early cinema and contemporary pornography, not widely available
until the 1970s. It usually consists of the images of one woman, who
may proceed to undress as if she were alone, which adds to the voyeuris-
tic appeal. Alternately, in the more exhibitionistic formula, the woman
may interact with the camera, as if it were an individual present in the
room with her. 26 Aspects of both are seen in Marilyn Times Five. Like
Cornell’s film, Conner’s is anti-narrative in that it disrupts the narrative
embedded in the original, and by extension, all films of this genre. 27
What I describe as the narrative, or the “story” of these films is not
the type of absurd plot occasionally tacked onto the beginning, before
the real action of the film begins, but rather a much more basic one:
that of the sexual availability of women for men, and the confluence
of this availability, or at least of its images, with commerce. The story,
so to speak, is that the female body is a standard commodity—like, for
instance, Coca-Cola. The source film that Conner has transformed is
entitled Apple Knockers and the Coke (1948), and it consists of a crude
series of shots of a mostly undressed woman, Arline Hunter, who bears
an exceptional resemblance to, but who is not, a young Marilyn Monroe
when she was still the unknown Norma Jean Baker. 28 As the title sug-
gests, Hunter uses both an apple and a bottle of Coke as props for her
performance. Conner juxtaposes a recording of the “actual” Monroe
singing “I’m Through with Love” over the images, and the song’s formal
structure determines that of his film. It is repeated five times, with each
repetition of the song marking off one section of the film. Between each
repetition, breaks of silence on the soundtrack and black leader on the
screen clearly demarcate one section from the next. As the song plays
each time, we see different scenes from the original film repeated, slowed
down, sped up, reversed, or changed in order.
Repetition is one of the most basic ways Conner disrupts the narrative
that Apple Knockers and the Coke attempts to tell about Monroe/Hunter.
It is the same story that every film like it attempts to tell about women.
In essence, the entire aspect of consumer culture that survives through
selling images of sexually available women functions in similar fashion.
Each segment of Marilyn Times Five is distinguished by the repetition of
at least one series of shots from the original film. For the sake of clarity, I
will briefly explicate the repeated scenes in the five sections.29
Section 1: Film begins in silence, with three repeated shots of
Hunter moving her hand up to her hair while on her back, and bend-
ing sideways at the waist. The music begins on the fourth such shot.
There is a fifth repetition, then break to black leader. Two different
shots are repeated of Hunter playing with the Coke bottle. Two dif-
ferent shots of her lying down; the second one shows her rolling onto
her back.
150  Recycled Images
Section 2: Eight repeated shots showing the camera moving from
­ unter’s face down her body as she moves her hand from her upper chest
H
onto her breast. The shots are each cut slightly differently so that each
repetition shows her moving her hand slightly lower. Three repeated
shots as she brings her arms to her hair (as in Section 1). Thirteen re-
peated shots of Hunter lying back and then rolling over onto her side. The
seventh is extended, holding on her body as she is still. The next six shots
show the camera moving slightly higher on her body toward her head.
Section 3: Begins in silence, with four repeated shots of Hunter lying
on her back and throwing the apple in the air above her chest. The shots
begin right after she has thrown the apple, and end as she catches it.
­Music begins after the second repetition. Six repeated shots from above
as Hunter, on her back, picks up the apple and holds it above her chest
(out of the frame). On the last repetition, the camera pulls back as she
rolls over onto her stomach. The last section of the shot is then repeated
five times, with the last two slightly longer. In the last, the apple reap-
pears in her hand and she takes a bite of it. Two shots as she begins to
roll the bitten apple down her chest, lying down. The third time the shot
is extended as it rolls all the way down her legs and she sits up.
Section 4: Five repeated shots of Hunter’s torso from above, at the end of
which she brings her arms straight up in the air and then crosses the right
one over her chest, leaving the left in the air. The fourth and fifth repeti-
tions are longer, and at the end of the fifth, she is given the apple, which she
then twirls over her chest. Eight repeated shots in which she rolls the apple
down her chest. The second and third shots are extended so we see the ap-
ple disappear off the side of her hip. Black leader is inserted here, then five
repetitions in quick succession, and then a cut to black again. Four repeated
shots as Hunter runs her fingers down the side of her rib cage, showing only
her right breast and her chin. Inserted between each shot is a successively
longer clip of black leader. Segment ends on four repeated shots, holding
over her torso and head, going to black on the last notes of the song.
Section 5: Begins on black, with the music playing for over one minute.
The first two verses of song are over black only. Beginning with the last
repetition of the word “love” at the end of the second verse, and then
at the words “care,” “share,” “swear,” and “you” in the bridge, as the
music swells the black screen goes to white and then back to black. After
the bridge, a shot of Hunter’s torso, moving from her hips to her head as
she moves her hands to her hair and bends to the side (as in Section 1),
is repeated four times, each shot lasting the same length as one line of
the last verse of the song. During the second repetition of the last verse,
there is a repeated shot as Hunter lies down on her side, then rolls over
onto her back, going to black at the end of every other line. The final two
lines of the song correspond to a shot of Hunter’s body from the side,
seemingly unmoving. The camera slowly moves from her head down to
her legs and the song ends on black.
 Recycled Images  151
Marilyn Times Five’s use of repetition in its representation of images
of the female body echoes and mocks the typical repetition of sexual de-
sire, frustration, and release. The filmic material that Conner transforms
was designed for private viewing only: for men, either alone or in groups,
to watch in their homes, and to repeat as desired. Such films were also
shown in brothels, a fact that underscores their difference from contem-
porary pornography, in that they were intended to arouse, not to satisfy,
the sexual appetite. Conner’s film, however, plays with the expectations
of the viewer for such a film. He repeats shots multiple times, only to
cut away each time; inserts long sequences consisting of black and white
leader only; and circumvents the expected progression that Hunter start
out clothed and end naked (rather she begins half-naked, undresses, then
is partly clothed again, and then disrobes again at the end (Figure 4.1)).
Repetition of favorite shots is certainly not without a place in the use of
such films, but the images that Conner repeats are not what one might
expect. For instance, in Section 4, we see Hunter repeatedly roll an apple
off the side of her hip, so it seems to disappear and then reappear on
her body again, as if by magic. (This is again reminiscent of the “magic
films” of early cinema.) The repetition of this rather odd action makes the

Figure 4.1  B
 ruce Conner. Marilyn Times Five, 1973. The Conner Family Trust
and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. © The Conner Family Trust.
152  Recycled Images
physics of it at least as fascinating as anything else within the frame. In
Section 2, we watch her lower her torso to the ground and then roll over
onto her side so that her back is toward the camera, thirteen times. The
repetition of such seemingly mundane or bizarre actions—for instance,
at the beginning of Section 4, she raises both arms straight up above her
and then crosses one over her chest, leaving the other in the air—outside
of their intended context causes the appearance of the naked female body
to lose its ability to produce a frisson of shock or pleasure. Rather, it be-
comes a nearly geometric assemblage of lines and curves in space.
The graininess of the images works against the expectation of voyeuris-
tic pleasure, as they become hardly legible: we know what’s supposed to
be there, but as the film progresses, increasingly the images of Hunter’s
body are transformed into a glowing white field set in the fuzzy grays
of the background. William Wees aptly describes the film’s conundrum:

Despite its stag movie and pin-up girl clichés, the film reneges on
its initial invitation to the voyeur. Instead of a closer, more intimate
view of a woman’s body, the repetition of shots and the extreme
graininess of the film increasingly draw attention to the body of the
film itself, to the film’s own image-ness.
(11)

The expected physiologic markers of the nude female torso—the nipples

and navel—are nearly obscured in the graininess and pixilation of the
images. What is perhaps surprising about these segments of the film is
their stark, graphic, beauty. As the images gradually lose their legibility
with respect to the body, they are transformed—metamorphosed—into
something else altogether. As in one of Conner’s earlier films, Breakaway
(1966), the female body seems to become loosened from its physical lim-
itations, to become ethereal or ghostly. Unlike in Breakaway, Hunter’s
body occasionally stops looking like a body at all. As Wees observes,
Conner consistently makes the materiality of the medium part of his sub-
ject. As a collage, Marilyn Times Five never allows the viewer to forget its
materiality, that the intimacy simulated here is only that, simulation. For
every moment in which Hunter looks directly into the camera, smiling
and laughing, there are more in which the deterioration of the film ob-
scures any attempt at legibility, or when Conner’s cuts, such as the “apple
rolling off the hip” scene, accomplish feats that are not possible in life.
But this is only a momentary release or reprieve from the reality of
the physical world. The moments that insist upon this physicality—this
mortality—are equally important. They remind us not only that ­Monroe
is long dead, but also that Hunter is no longer the young woman we see
on the screen; these images of youth and exterior beauty foreground
the biologic reality of human aging and mortality. The shots that most
explicitly recall the body’s mortality (many of which are among those
 Recycled Images  153
Conner repeats) resist what one would expect from a film that purports
to arouse. They are its antithesis. By the end of the film, the fact of
­Monroe’s death is inescapable (Figure 4.2). For instance, in the final shot
of the film, we see Hunter’s body from the side, motionless and lying on
the ground. Slumped over on her side, seemingly still: Conner takes an
image that lasts less than a second in the original film, and extends it
to its logical conclusion. The film, the camera, and the audience are all
done with her; once the performance is over, so is she.
Conner’s film—created out of a copy of the original film—strongly
recalls the original text, but perhaps even more strongly (since relatively
few viewers will know the original text), it recalls the text of Monroe’s
life and career. 30 The music added to the soundtrack makes this inter-
textual memory explicit. Conner’s use of Monroe’s voice singing “I’m
Through with Love” juxtaposed to images of what is clearly supposed
to be her simulated naked body raises questions of the identity of the
mass-produced image. As he said about the making of the film,

It was a very difficult movie to make, balancing the erotic ­imagery

and working it over and over, forcing two images of Marilyn M
­ onroe
together to reveal this process—one image was the girlie film, the
other th[e] sound track….
(Selwyn 96–7)

Does it matter whether or not this is the “real” Monroe in the images?
From an economic standpoint, the original film, as a commodity, would
have been worth a great deal more money if it had been Marilyn Monroe

Figure 4.2  Bruce Conner Marilyn Times Five, 1973 The Conner Family Trust
and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles © The Conner Family Trust.
154  Recycled Images
and not Arline Hunter in the images, or even if its intended audience
simply believed that it was. The images of Hunter in the film constantly
invoke her status as a shoddy “copy” of Monroe. Diedrich Diederichsen
argues that

the fake Marilyn… becomes the true Marilyn, on one hand because
she is musicalized by repetition against the conventional narration,
and on the other because the excerpt’s repetition enables the cheaper
production values of the film from which the found material is
taken to fortify the element of photographic materiality against the
cultural-­industrial myth.
(350)

And yet not only that: this “fake” copy of Monroe is a copy made before
she was “Monroe.” Hunter in Marilyn Times Five becomes a copy of
a copy of what is imagined, popularly, as an “original,” Norma Jean
Baker, whose nude photos graced the first issue of Playboy magazine.
Those images of Baker are thought to be the “authentic” Monroe, a
kind of alternative reality version (particularly in the wake of her death)
of what she “must” have been like before she became “Monroe,” and
“could-have-been” had her life gone differently.
Alternately, does it matter whether or not the “real” Monroe is
singing the song that was famously hers?31 Monroe, as “Sugar Kane
­Kowalczyk,” sang “I’m Through with Love” in the Billy Wilder-directed
film Some Like It Hot (1959). Named the best comedy of all time by the
American Film Institute, this film is in fact a tragicomedy about mass
murder and cross-dressing.32 In it, Monroe (playing a 1920s-era torch
singer) performs an even more sexualized version of her own, already
sexualized, public persona, a woman so overstimulated and overstim-
ulating that she can cure a man of impotence.33 Jack Lemon and Tony
Curtis’s characters impersonate women badly (but for big laughs) in the
film, but Monroe’s performance is just as much of an impersonation,
a fantasy of female availability taken to laughable extremes. The film
seems to propose on the one hand that gender is malleable and a type of
performance and on the other hand that the romance between C ­ urtis’s
and Monroe’s characters can only be possible when they shed their re-
spective drags (for Curtis’s character, both of his drags—as a woman
and as a millionaire) and show their “true” selves. The performance of
“I’m Through with Love” comes at the moment when Sugar believes she
has been rejected—not by the musician, but by the millionaire. In this
moment of public pathos, she is on stage, wearing a gown that appears
to be, but is not, transparent. The contrast between this performance
and the one cobbled together by Conner in Marilyn Times Five makes
visible complications in image/sound relations as they are usually pro-
posed, transparently, in the narrative Hollywood film.
 Recycled Images  155
This mesh of relations proposed in Marilyn Times Five between the
images seen on the screen and those heard on the soundtrack becomes
even more complex when the original material Conner was working with
is brought into consideration. No one speaks in the film (either in Marilyn
Times Five or Apple Knockers and the Coke), nor mimes speech, so no
soundtrack is “necessary” for the film to maintain its intelligibility, at least
for the original film. Its story is clear. Conner’s work of disruption and
transformation—that is, his collage of the source film—is significantly en-
hanced by the juxtaposition of Monroe’s famous song on the soundtrack.
To take an anachronistic counterexample, in a typical music video, one of
two sets of possibilities would be expected. On the one hand, you might
have a song sung by the same person who was pictured in the images,
thus mimicking a live performance. (This is the case in Breakaway, where
Conner films Toni Basil dancing, though she doesn’t mime singing the
words of her song.) On the other hand, the images of a sexually available
woman could be used to sell the record of an unrelated (usually male)
group.34 In the one case, the words and music on the soundtrack are pur-
ported to come from the body being shown in the images; in the other
case, the words and music are purported to be about, or to refer to in
some way, or to make accessible, the body being shown. In Marilyn Times
Five, none of these possibilities is true, and the expected sound/image
relation is in every way disconnected and disrupted by Conner’s juxtapo-
sitional collage work. Chronologically, the vocal performance takes place
before Conner created his collage film (Marilyn Times Five), but after the
footage comprising Apple Knockers and the Coke was shot. The identity
of the individual in the image is related to, and yet not identical with, the
one who is identifiably performing the music.35 The milieu and the pro-
duction qualities of the respective performances—the one in the images,
and the one alluded to by the song—are in distinct opposition to each
other, representing two clearly opposed settings for the consumption of
the sexualized and instrumentalized images of the female body.
And what relation can Marilyn Monroe, or Norma Jean Baker, claim
to the image of her body produced for commerce: ownership? Or is it
no more than a distant memory? Marilyn Times Five engages in an ex-
plicit critique of such representations of women, as well as a much more
general critique of the symbolic and iconic nature of gendered relations
(Figure 4.3). The props of the film—an apple and a bottle—are over-
determined in their relation to this symbolic economy. Both represent
prototypical “American-ness” as objects of consumer culture, both are
banal, and both are associated with female sexuality. The hourglass
shape of the Coke bottle mirrors Hunter’s (and Monroe’s) physical
form; at the same time, Coke bottles have served as tools for both rape
and consensual sexual relations. The naked woman + apple combina-
tion surely brings to mind Eve and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil, while the apple’s “sugar”-y sweetness is a more natural version of
156  Recycled Images

Figure 4.3  Bruce Conner Marilyn Times Five, 1973 The Conner Family Trust
and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles © The Conner Family Trust.

what has been synthesized in Coke, and also recalls Monroe’s charac-
ter’s name from Some Like It Hot.36 Conner’s repetition of the scenes in
which the actress repeatedly uses these objects to caress her own body
or drinks suggestively out of the Coke bottle and then “accidentally”
spills it on herself highlights the corrosive connection between female
sexuality and the use of such images of women not only as commodities
in and of themselves, but also to sell other goods. 37
Conner’s response to this ever-increasing commodification of female
sexuality (or at least of its images) is to destroy one such set of images for
the marketplace. His collage film engages in a form of iconoclasm. By tak-
ing a striptease film and turning it into an art film, he ruins it as an object
that can be sold for profit as a mass commodity. He de-­instrumentalizes
the image of Hunter’s/Monroe’s body by making it something no longer
profitable, and by making the images no longer sexually tantalizing in
the way that they had been intended to be. Even if the film does retain
some of its erotic charge, the generic conventions of the material have
been frustrated, if not fully evacuated, by Conner’s act of collage. As
Conner’s biographer, Brian Hatch, describes it, the result is

a film that earnestly endeavors to deconstruct the popular culture

objectification of women… while daring its audience not to fall un-
der the spell it casts…. [I]t undercuts its eroticism via some of the
starkest cinematic gestures in Conner’s oeuvre.
(177–8)
 Recycled Images  157
The end result is a film “once erotic and deadened” (179). Hatch claims
that Conner’s work “consistently points inward, toward an unreachable
center, even as it opens out toward the public sphere (achieving the latter
most often via the outmoded goods of postwar America’s recent but for-
gotten past)” (9). Throughout his filmmaking career, Conner has consis-
tently refused to honor the illusion of the fourth wall, and rather directs
the trajectory of his films’ impact outward, directly at the viewer. Bruce
Jenkins describes Conner’s work as a kind of “second-person” cinema:

It would be Conner’s singular contribution to remove the viewer

from the Brakhagean paradigm—from a close encounter, that is,
with the personal vision of the filmmaker—and from Hollywood’s
third-person, omniscient fictions as well. The result would be a
completely novel viewing experience that might well best be termed,
“second-person film,” continually addressing itself to the experience
of “you,” the film viewer, through an active reworking of the al-
ready coded and manipulated cultural material of the movies.
(187)

The direct address of the audience was, of course, one of the markers of
the cinema of attractions, and one of the first aspects of it to disappear
with the coming of narrative film. Conner’s films don’t nudge and wink
at us directly in the same way, but they do refuse the illusion of the co-
herent narrative viewpoint, one that can be focused somewhere outside
the self. In doing so, he is particularly adept at addressing the “consumer
packaging of experience” (Carney, npn) and the “deformation of indi-
viduals by society” (Solnit 62).38
Of course, even in 1968, it was already too late to extract the market
value from the post-death images of the body of Monroe, which have
been used to sell everything from Playboy to Chanel No. 5.39 Conner
does, however, give her voice a point of access to what has happened to
her image in life and death. By juxtaposing Monroe’s singing voice to
the images that are a simulacrum of her youthful pinup poses (as Baker),
he invests his collage with a sharply implied visual contrast, between the
seedy world of the girlie film that Baker participated in (which is made
even seedier for Hunter, pretending to be Baker after the fact) and the
glamorous actress and singer, Monroe, that the superimposed and ap-
parently authentic vocal performance invokes (and whose absence from
the visual frame of the film acts as a commentary on the inauthenticity
of this aspect of Monroe’s life as well). While much of the performance
of Hunter in Apple Knockers and the Coke is meant to invoke a sense of
what Benjamin would term “aura” (the direct address of the audience,
in this case), Conner’s manipulation of a copy of this film exposes the
evacuation of aura that is embedded in film’s medium via the copy.
Along with the repetitions of the visual images, of course, there are
repetitions of the song as well. The initial repetitions of that performance
158  Recycled Images
allow the viewer/listener to experience the aural pleasure of the song,
and the perverse pleasure in recognizing that it is Monroe singing to a
falsified version of her own image, as well as the ironic contrast between
the content of the song and the images on the screen. As the song con-
tinues to repeat, this repetition brings about a level of detachment, and
an awareness of the separation and juxtaposition between what is seen
and what is heard. In the repetition of both image and song, it seems that
“Conner’s editing emphasizes the surface tension between auditory and
visual experience, getting both sensory tracks to reveal more by their
difference than they would if they were matched up” (Gizzi 92). By the
time the song is heard for a fifth time, one reaches a level of separation
from the referential and semantic meaning of the song, as when a single
word is repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated. Repetition
evacuates semantic meaning, even as it “makes” memories. This sense of
repetition may try to engender a “sense of estrangement in the viewer,”
as they use “familiar, even iconic, events and people, banalized by fre-
quent repetition in the mass media, and endeavor to make us see their
subjects anew, as would a foreigner encountering them for the first time”
(Turvey 64). Just as the film seems to begin again (as Conner repeats the
same images he used at the beginning of Marilyn Times Five), the viewer/
listener reaches a disorienting loss of perspective—is this the beginning
of the film or the end? Is it the beginning of Monroe’s career—or the end
of her life? Is this a very young woman we see or an older one whom we
hear? The disorientation provoked here is one of collage’s most striking
qualities, in that it can induce a fully “new vision” of the world, if only
for a moment. Conner directs Marilyn Times Five’s social critique at the
commodification of not only these images but also the memories and the
affect held by those memories.
Perhaps the ultimate irony of this film is that for all the disruption that
he has forcefully inserted into what was, originally, only a brief span of
filmic material, Conner is unable (or unwilling) to erase fully the eroti-
cism of the original film, or unwilling to strip it of aesthetic beauty. As
one critic has noted,

Marilyn Times Five gives us many experiences at once: a cold-

blooded  autopsy record using the warmest and most human of
­materials; a softcore smoker turned Brechtian Punch-and-Judy
show; and a gentle meditation on cinema and mortality. Conner
grants Marilyn immortality but, through the grainy deterioration of
the film stock, allows her, too, to return to dust.
(Wilder npn)

The ambivalence that surrounds Marilyn Times Five may derive from
Conner’s intention (as one reviewer interprets it) to “explore… the ques-
tion of how a film’s form can influence the way an audience receives the
 Recycled Images  159
content” (Kleinhans 14). If Conner does “force… the viewer to come to
terms with the raw content of the footage, which unmistakably has a
sexist voyeuristic appeal,” the question remains whether the residue of
eroticism that remains with the footage—and the additional aesthetic
appeal that Conner has created through his editing of the original—­
neutralizes the critical content of this film, or merely substitutes one type
of voyeurism for another (Kleinhans 15).
I do not, however, believe either to be the case. Like Rose Hobart’s use
of the images of dancing “native” women, the inclusion of some identi-
fiable sections of the original material serves to remind the viewer, with-
out question, of the cultural context of the original material, in all of
its ugliness. One can imagine, for instance, a version of Marilyn Times
Five in which Conner only included sections of the film in which the de-
terioration was so great that the image of Hunter’s body has been trans-
formed into an abstract collection of white pixels. Such a film, while
potentially interesting and aesthetically beautiful, would not have the
immediacy of Marilyn Times Five; rather, its critique would require an
explanatory apparatus in order to be effective. While such a film might
not invoke any of the ambivalence that I have discussed, it would be
much less powerful.
These questions go back to the most basic premises concerning the use
of collage as critique. Why, the question might be succinctly put, use col-
lage at all to make a political critique when straightforward discourse or
narration is so much clearer?40 Collage filmmakers, like other collage
artists, I would argue, prefer to court this type of ambivalence, even if it
risks audience misunderstanding. This risk of misunderstanding may be
preferable to contributing to the fields of images and words that, while
admirably clear, carry with them a complicity in the coercive systems of
commerce that use images to exert power over individuals’ desires or,
alternately, that avoid such questions altogether in favor of abstraction.

*****

To cut back to the beginning, Rose Hobart, too, critiques the com-
modification of the images of women. Cornell’s critique seems less
­strident—and the content of his images less obviously provocative—
than Conner’s, but is no less deeply felt or less central to his film or the
collage technique he used to create it. Cornell, as I discussed earlier,
was deeply influenced by early cinema and mourned the loss of what
he viewed as the stark beauty of “silent” film. For him, the switch to
recorded sound signified a change from cinema as art form to cinema
as commercialized, mass entertainment. In Rose Hobart, he takes one
example of this change (and an early one at that) and forcefully reverses
the process. If Cornell had merely turned East of Borneo into a “silent”
film, it seems unlikely that there would still be strong interest in the film.
160  Recycled Images
Rather, Cornell’s process of transformation is a much more extreme one:
he takes a film with all of the elements of a piece of commercial en-
tertainment and systematically destroys them. By removing nearly any
vestige of what could be recuperable in the film as a salable commodity,
Cornell creates his fantasy version of what film could be as an art form.
At that time, cinema was at a transition point between being the cottage
industry that it had been until the 1920s and the massive industrial be-
hemoth that it would become by the 1970s—and thus Cornell’s critique
of the use and commodification of filmic images of women takes a less
strident form than that of Conner. But both of these texts are directed
against, at least in part, what Benjamin described as the way in which

[f]ilm capital uses the revolutionary opportunities implied by this con-

trol [that the audience has over the medium] for counterrevolutionary
purposes. Not only does the cult of the movie star which it fosters pre-
serve the magic of the personality which has long been no more than
the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart,
the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is
seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses.
(“Work of Art” 33)

Benjamin here invokes both of the ways that the transformation of film
from art form to mass commodity implies a “corruption” of its poli-
tics: from the perspective of film actors and of film audiences. Both Rose
­Hobart and Marilyn Times Five interrogate the “cult of the movie star”
through their manipulation of images of female movie stars (or their
­copies), and, ultimately, by their destruction of these images as salable
commodities. In the 1930s, the systematic use of female sexuality (implied
in both the “cult of the movie star” and the “cult of the audience”) to sell
literally everything had not yet hardened into the now-­recognizable form
that it had when Conner created his film.41 Marilyn Times Five, there-
fore, offers up a much more bitter and piercing critique. The death of
Monroe, while not an explicit part of the content of the film, structures
the possible range of responses to it, and increases the sense of urgency
in the response it demands from its audience.42 But like the recording of
“I’m Through with Love,” played over the images of Marilyn Times Five,
we are always too late. Unlike Linda’s body in East of Borneo, the body
Conner “returns” to the screen cannot be saved or taken out of harm’s
way, not even by the magic that still, sometimes, lives in the cinema.

Notes
1 Montage was for a time the favored term of critics of the avant-garde when
discussing all types of juxtapositional work (not just film); this derives from
Benjamin.
2 One might think of the “training” montage in the film Rocky (1976).
 Recycled Images  161
3 While Cornell is particularly (and for obvious chronological reasons) fo-
cused on the cinema, Conner’s work is directed at least as much toward other
forms of moving images, including television and, in particular, advertising.
4 Gunning’s use of the term “attractions” derives from its use by Eisenstein.
Gunning’s provocative and brief article takes seriously the provocations
of the Dadaists, Futurists, and Surrealists with respect to conventional
cinema—both their over-the-top optimism about the possibilities of the
medium, and their devastation in the aftermath of commercially viable nar-
rative cinema. In this respect, the attitudes he tracks are much like those of
Cornell, though Cornell never to my knowledge contemplated gluing cin-
ema goers to their seats or applying electric shocks as F. T. Marinetti and
­Eisenstein did.
5 An exception would be work of those like Stan Brakhage who work with the
film stock itself as opposed to recording images on the stock.
6 While this is not exactly a new observation (the most significant and widely
cited predecessor being Laura Mulvey’s 1974 essay “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema”), it is not one that has been extended to either of these
filmmakers previously. For example, in Melissa Pearl Friedling’s otherwise
interesting article, “Images of Women in American Collage Film,” she dis-
misses the work of both Cornell and Conner as ultimately only recapitulat-
ing gendered relations, “as is.”
(On Cornell): While both of these important filmmakers [Cornell and
Lewis Klahr] provocatively take femininity as their subject matter,
their films are not sustained critiques of gender. Rather, both Klahr’s
and ­Cornell’s film homages function more as nostalgia and reverie in a
particular version of femininity that the filmmakers prove to be lost or
impossibly distant.
(31)
(On Conner): But, the incisive, directed, potent, and decidedly entertain-
ing political satire of both Conner and [Stan] Vanderbeek’s collage films
is, however, dependent on an oppositional logic that repeatedly deploys
images of women as reductive clichés in order to decode the contrasting
images of war, rocket ships, and disaster. And by deploying these images
of women as emblematic counterparts to the “masculine” domains of
politics and national security, they perpetuate these dominant ideologi-
cal binaries without substantively transforming them.
(31–2). (Note: She is discussing A Movie here, not Marilyn
Times Five, which isn’t mentioned in the article.)
Two of the most important works on Cornell indulge in the same kind of
rhetoric about him: Utopia Parkway, Solomon’s biography, and the first
monograph on him to significantly treat his films, Jodi Hauptman’s Joseph
Cornell: Stargazing at the Cinema.
7 Conner was the second, more than twenty years later with A Movie. Film
historian Sean Savage has uncovered a film he terms the Madison News
Reel, which is an entirely found footage film and seems to antedate Rose
Hobart by a few years. (He dates it from around 1932.) However, as Savage
admits in his article on the subject, the film is not of the same lineage as Rose
Hobart, A Movie and similar texts, and was likely shown only locally in the
area around Bristol, Maine. Michael Pigott, in Joseph Cornell versus Cin-
ema, claims that the first found footage films were made by Esfir Shub, an
early Soviet filmmaker whose film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927)
was “constructed out of newsreel, amateur, and other found footage” (113).
162  Recycled Images
Nevertheless, Rose Hobart remains the earliest example of found footage
film to attain any level of prominence among film critics and historians.
8 This anecdote is retold frequently in works on Cornell; the story could be
apocryphal, as it seems almost too perfect to be true.
9 Michelson’s article is the first to take Cornell’s films seriously. She attempts
to break down Cornell’s films into a taxonomic list of qualities, some of
which certainly seem right—such as the use of the frame and the “assertive
editing”—and some of which do not, or at least do not seem to be explicated
enough, such as her insistence on Cornell’s use of narrative in Rose Hobart.
10 Which is why it is surprising to read experimental film critic P. Adams S­ itney’s
insistence on Cornell’s “roughness,” even his “crudeness,” in his essay, “The
Cinematic Gaze of Joseph Cornell”. Hauptman continues this trend:
Rose Hobart’s performance in East of Borneo consists of anxious and
twitchy movements of the body and rapidly changing facial expressions.
In collecting frames of the actress, Cornell seeks not to smooth out her
jarring behavior but to emphasize her frenetic actions through disjunc-
tive editing. Reveling in these joints, breaks, and splices (each of which
presents another face of the actress), the artist constructs Rose Hobart
of mismatches, awkward juxtapositions, and temporal discontinuities.
Cornell highlights the multiple fragments and junctures at the heart of
the cinematic medium, the piecework quality that is usually hidden in the
making of the traditional narrative film. Disruption (and, as we will see,
eruption) was the primary goal of Cornell’s editing process.
(89)
11 Linda, in this schema, is a concatenation of Marlow and the Beloved. Her
husband represents Kurtz, and the Prince, Kurtz’s priestess lover.
12 The footage of the “natives,” and, in particular, of the women dancing, has
the look of faux ethnography.
13 That is to say, special effects. Specific scenes from Rose Hobart will be noted
by a minute and second notation taken from my own viewing of the film,
specifically from the remastered DVD version in the “Treasures from the
American Film Archives” collection.
14 It may seem paradoxical to state that Rose Hobart disrupts narrativity when
I am also arguing that Cornell has crafted a new plot for it. However, two
factors mitigate this potential paradox: (1) the plot has almost no relation
to the majority of the images that Cornell has carried over from East of
Borneo, and those images that do construct the plot directly are relegated to
the very beginning and end of the film; (2) the story that Cornell has created
here, the one I’ve termed a myth, is intentionally generalizable in the way
that myths tend to be. These two factors tend to increase the sense of narra-
tive disruption, as the narrative that there is in Rose Hobart is both lightly
connected to its visual images and extremely inappropriate for a film that is
in any way related to the narrative Hollywood tradition.
15 The similarity between this image and Eugène Atget’s famous photograph
of Parisians viewing an eclipse does not seem coincidental. Hauptman treats
this subject at length.
16 Cornell also excised Linda’s husband’s misogynistic commentary, made
when the Prince tells him that “a white woman” has arrived: “Probably your
typical he-woman adventuress.”
17 Strictly speaking, East of Borneo is not a narrative of colonialism: Marudu
hasn’t been colonized, unlike Borneo, and that is, essentially, the problem.
The Prince’s conviction of his own, and his culture’s, superiority over those
of his potential colonizers sets him up for to fall due to Linda’s actions and,
 Recycled Images  163
by extension, sets up the destruction of his kingdom and all of its inhabi-
tants when the volcano erupts. Beyond his many other transgressions, his
unchecked “native” hubris in believing that he could have a sexual relation-
ship with Linda provokes her into shooting him.
18 For example, characters in television shows, when agreeing to meet some-
where, will almost never specify a time or place.
19 This observation could be extended to the way that the interpretation of
sound in film has changed as well, as James Lastra explains:
The “performative” tradition, allied to a more topographic and less
narrative approach to the image, tended to treat the image as a pre-
text for the gratuitous production of sound. Deriving its impetus from
vaudeville, it stressed comic accentuation and an intermittent, punctu-
ated temporality, resulting in an antinarrative and antipsychological
form of humorous attention-grabbing. The later, and even more dom-
inant, tradition stressed a rigid hierarchy in providing sound effects,
separating the image into zones of importance and of unimportance….
Above all, synchronized sounds had to clarify or underscore the story
by matching mood, tempo, or character psychology, and simultane-
ously create and enforce the hierarchies of the image… [S]ound ef-
fects hierarchies were ultimately determined by the necessities of the
increasingly complex, psychologically motivated, multishot narrative
film, which had emerged as the commodity upon which the emerging
industry was erected.
(73)
20 Cornell apparently showed a version of the film that was tinted pink (rose).
21 The identification of the music is found in Hauptman. However, Pigott ex-
plains that this record, dating from 1957, could not have been the original
soundtrack to Rose Hobart when it was originally shown by Cornell, though
Cornell very well may have chosen it at a later date. The original soundtrack
to Rose Hobart remains unknown (23–4).
On the standard use of music to ensure continuity, Bordwell et al. claim
that, “From the start, musical accompaniment has provided the cinema’s
most overt continuity factor…. [C]ontinuous musical accompaniment
functions as narrative.”
(31)
22 Essentially a marketing tool used to boost the sales of sheet music, the illus-
trated song consisted of, on the one hand, recorded music and, on the other
hand, slides that were shown theoretically to “illustrate” the song. ­According
to Lastra,
While truly audiovisual, these were essentially sound performances that
encouraged sing-alongs; the visual presentation was decidedly secondary.
Song promotion and sheet music sales drove this practice and organized
its formal properties, putting music ahead of images. In economic, concep-
tual, and structural terms, the song—sound—was clearly dominant over
the image.
(99)
23 “Cornell associates this music with darkness and instructs projectionists to
begin playing the music before the film starts, keeping the audience in ob-
scured anticipation” (Hauptman 100).
24 Shocking in the same way that one may be startled to take a sip of wine
when juice is expected.
164  Recycled Images
25 Marjorie Keller, in her work on film and childhood entitled The Untutored
Eye, provides one such example:
[I]t is evident that part of Rose Hobart’s power comes from our knowl-
edge of its status as a disrupted narrative film. The sets, camera work,
costumes, fades, and acting all contribute to the sense of its former life
as a dramatic account of the adventure of this central female character.
In choosing to make Rose Hobart, Cornell found the narrative of East
of Borneo unsatisfying. He chose to emphasize the furtive and fleeting
gestures of Rose (most often by placing them at the beginning or end of
a shot). His is a study of gesture rather than possession, jealousy, or dec-
adence. It is based on visual rhymes and rhythm… [B]y reorienting the
viewer toward Hobart’s gestures, he “lays stress on the events themselves
rather than on the relations of time (order) or cause which unite them.
(108–9)
26 The commonly used umbrella term for filmed erotica in the era prior to the
1970s, the “stag film” connotes something much closer to contemporary
pornography, including explicit footage of two or more individuals engaging
in sexual acts.
27 While the lack of a conventional narrative in an experimental film is not
particularly unusual, Conner has resisted even the notion that he might plan
out his film before he begins the process of filming it, to his own financial
detriment. In an interview in “Film Comment,” he discussed the impact that
publicly supported institutions have had on experimental filmmaking.
I’ve received awards, and I’ve received grants for filmmaking—I wasn’t
going to refuse to take them. I found, though, that when I did receive a
film grant it was because I was more or less able to write a script, and
that’s what has been superimposed on the independent film movement:
you have to write a script. You are expected to know what the end result
will be before you even start the first bit of film footage.
(74)
28 The identity of this woman—whether or not she was really Monroe—was
in dispute for many years even after the release of the film. The title of the
original film and the woman’s name are stated in Jenkins. Arline Hunter
appeared as “Playmate of the Month” in the August 1954 issue of Playboy
magazine, posing in a fashion that was clearly meant to recall Monroe’s pose
from 1949 (as Baker). Hunter went on to appear in a number of B-movies,
including such titles as The Art of Burlesque (1951), A Virgin in Hollywood
(1953), Outerspace Jitters (1957), and Sex Kittens Go to College (1960).
29 I have only described the repeated shots within each segment. There are also
many shots—such as the standing shot taken from Hunter’s waist down, as
she removes her skirt—that are repeated between two or more segments, but
not within a single segment. There are also some single shots, and many sec-
tions of black or white leader that are, of course, in some sense repetitions,
but impossible to distinguish from each other.
30 Since Apple Knockers and the Coke is, as of this writing (2017), available to
view on YouTube (and has been for some time), the film’s audience may be
much wider than it was when Conner created Marilyn Times Five.
31 Though there was for a time debate over whether or not the images were
“actually” Monroe, no one to my knowledge has wondered whether or not
the voice in the song is “actually” Monroe singing.
32 The way in which virtually all criticism and discussion of the film seem
to ignore the instigating action of the plot—the murders—suggests that
 Recycled Images  165
audiences (including professional critics) have become so inured to the typi-
cal plot requirements of narrative Hollywood film that all events that do not
fit the profile of the given genre are easily smoothed over, ignored even, in
the interest of plot continuity.
33 In Some Like It Hot, the two main characters, professional musicians in a
mob-connected speakeasy, are forced into hiding after accidentally witness-
ing a gangster hit turned massacre. With no money and nowhere to go, they
take jobs in an all-female, all-blonde band in Florida. Monroe plays “Sugar
Kane Kowalczyk” a down-on-her-luck singer/ukulele player in this band with
a bad history of falling for no-good saxophone players. Determined to gold-
dig her way out of this situation, she decides to marry a millionaire vacation-
ing in Florida. Tony Curtis’s character (Joe), who learns all of this by playing
her new best girl friend, makes himself over as a shy, impotent millionaire,
and gets her to fall in love with him. Late in the film, Curtis and Lemmon’s
characters again witness a mob hit, this time while hiding under the table in a
banquet room, hoping to avoid detection by the very men who are murdered.
34 Female performers have used their sexuality to sell their own music as well,
of course, with Madonna being perhaps the iconic example of this.
35 It is tempting to say the Hunter “impersonates” Monroe, though I’m not
clear what this impersonation would be constituted by, when the individual
in question is nearly nude and does not speak.
36 Jenkins identifies the connection with Eve, and also connects the images of
Marilyn Times Five to the early science films of Eadweard Muybridge and
Étienne-Jules Marey. This is an interesting and insightful comparison, but,
like much of the criticism on the film, seems to ignore Conner’s clear critique
of gendered relations:

Marilyn has been transformed into a figurative “mother” to the work of

such artists as Joan Jonas and Carolee Schneemann. At the same time,
by accentuating the graininess of the footage, segmenting the motion,
and detaching the action from the clichéd gestures of the girlie movie, he
has also unearthed the cinema’s Eve. There is an archeological quality
to Conner’s sifting through this imagery, as if in the casual movements
and incidental actions of its subject he has discovered a study of motion
to rival that of his protocinematic forebears, Eadweard Muybridge and
Étienne-Jules Marey. Like the anonymous models who paraded across
Muybridge’s grid-marked stage, “Marilyn” has given herself over to our
edification, exhausted herself in training our gaze. By the end of the film,
she is emptied of meaning, and having tasted from the forbidden fruit
and sullied herself with the commercial elixir, her time is over.
(203)
37 Ironically, Conner’s film work has, in some sense, led the way not only for
music videos but also for legions of television advertisements. His early
films, like Breakaway and Cosmic Ray (1961) are, essentially, music vid-
eos, though they were never specifically used to sell anything. A later film,
­A merica Is Waiting (1981), was made with The Talking Heads, and was
designed for use in concert with their music but, apparently, the record label
had no interest in promoting it in this way and it was never used as such.
38 In another interview cited in Solnit’s book, Conner stated about his own work:
I think that one of the theses of the work is an assumption that the
­creature is good. That the society which we have is alienating to the
animal. It expresses power and violence and death and that’s its main
structure. And the signs of that are in the symbols that we see around us
166  Recycled Images
in the arts, in the clothes, in the roles that people play in society. That
people have to deal with this crucifixion of the spirit all the time, and
that how well they shine through that is the triumph of those individuals.
(65)
39 On Monroe’s images as a commodity fetish, Patricia Mellencamp’s com-
ments are apt:
Conner’s use of Monroe anticipates Warhol by several years, as well as
her obsessive, worshiped resuscitation in U.S. culture throughout the
1980s as a necrophiliac fetish….
Conner’s concern would appear to be less with death itself than with
the hideous form death has taken in our times. This is not an internal
quest for male identity as the sexual but is work firmly within the social,
the political, the historical which includes sexual and racial difference.
For Conner, the effects of masculine power are catastrophic.
(105–6)
Mellencamp, though her work on Conner is brief, is one of the few critics
who properly understands his work to be within the realm of the social,
and outside of the, as she puts it, “internal quest for male identity.” Most
critical commentary on Marilyn Times Five seems to interpret the film as
Conner’s insistence that, perhaps, Marilyn Monroe (or women in general)
was actually human and not merely an object. Others, like Cornell’s critics,
view Conner as having crafted a (twisted) valentine/love letter/piece of fan
mail to Monroe.
0 Conner’s use of the images of women—particularly of the images of female
4
sexuality, and sexually loaded paraphernalia, like stockings, garter belts,
and false eyelashes—has consistently opened him up to charges of misogyny,
or at least a kind of voyeurism. In an interview, he stated:
They [viewers of some of his assemblages] said, “He must really hate
women.” What I’m showing isn’t women. It’s garter belts and halters and
nylon stockings and false eyelashes, and falsity…. I see them as demonic
devices. Like there’s no reason a martyr should go around carrying
chains and thongs like you might see in a medieval icon. I was pointing
out that those were the same sorts of things—the chains and the locks
and the crown of thorns.
(Solnit 65)
41 This system of commodification is much the same—though perhaps more
extreme—today, and is so pervasive as to be nearly transparent.
42 The special features on the DVD version of Some Like It Hot are fascinating
in this regard. No one interviewed for these features (including Tony Curtis
and the actresses who performed in the band) can seem to speak about any-
thing except Monroe, her death, and her general state of instability during
the filming. While this pathologizing of Monroe may be understandable, it
seems simultaneously futile and extremely belated.
5 Cryptic Versions

We [beboppers] refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploita-

tion, nor would we live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the
sake of survival. But there was nothing unpatriotic about it. If Amer-
ica wouldn’t honor its Constitution and respect us as men, we couldn’t
give a shit about the American way. And they made it damn near un-­
American to appreciate our music.
—Kenny Clarke, quoted in Dizzy Gillespie,
To Be or Not… To Bop, 287

This quotation from Dizzy Gillespie’s autobiography captures the sense,

alive from the middle 1940s through the late 1960s and beyond, that
experimental forms of jazz music had a real purchase, for both musicians
and fans, on the social movements of the time, including, most signifi-
cantly, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. As
I will detail later in this chapter, bebop was born out of (in part) a sense
of revolt from the perceived “colonization” of jazz by white musicians
interested in capitalizing on the profitability of “swing.” Furthermore,
the increasing popularity of jazz with the white listening public, in the
midst of the failure of the United States to eradicate Jim Crow, precipi-
tated a situation where the discordant forms of bebop and later versions
of experimental jazz were perceived by many as a type of protest and
revolt against the status quo, in music and politics.
This combination of experimental music and politics was influential,
not only with musicians, but with those in the other arts as well. This
chapter examines two very different examples of postwar black poetry,
both of which are musically influenced, both of which use a collage form
that borrows from the example set by experimental jazz, and both of
which are deeply invested in politics in the broadest sense. The first of
these is Langston Hughes’s last book of original poetry, Ask Your Mama:
Twelve Moods for Jazz (1961). Ask Your Mama gives an allusive, accre-
tive, and angry account of postcolonial (largely African) and African
American histories, which Hughes accomplishes by combining a poetic
text with a parallel musical one. The source material for the poetic text
168  Cryptic Versions
is the dozens, a street ritual of insult here reworked into a form of inter-
racial accusation, while the musical text is inspired by experimental jazz.
Deeply engaged with music and politics throughout his career, Hughes
accomplished his most fully achieved synthesis of the two by construct-
ing a collage that is more cryptic than directly citational.
As I previously discussed in Chapter 1, I claim that collage has often
been used to articulate a social or political critique. To reiterate, it is
perhaps easy to wonder why someone who wants to make a point on
a matter of some urgency should choose to use a form that denies the
expected forms of rational language, including standard syntax. Lan-
guage as a conventional instrument of knowledge or communication
depends on syntax, the sequential arrangement of words. How can a writer
expect to get his point across when he veers away from the communally
agreed upon standards of language? Or, in other words, how can one
learn from a collage?
In Ask Your Mama, the poet’s answer to this question is largely in
the music. The poem’s musical text does most of the citational and ped-
agogical work, leaving the literary text free to articulate the political
critique. Yet, Ask Your Mama is very different from the political poetry
that Hughes had written before World War II and that had resulted in
his being branded un-American in the 1950s. It represents a departure
not only in its form (he had used a collage form in Montage of a Dream
Deferred, but one that was less extreme in its juxtapositional style) but
also for its newly apparent lack of faith in the basic American ideals
of democracy, equality, and freedom, anticipating, in certain ways, the
stridency of the Black Arts Movement. The unique status of this work in
his oeuvre can be traced in part to his treatment at the hands of Joseph
McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and the
attendant Cold War hysteria and paranoia about Communism. The
event that most directly sparked his writing of Ask Your Mama, though,
must be one of the stranger events in American social history—the
drunken rioting of thousands of white college students at the Newport
Jazz ­Festival in 1960, in the moment between the groundbreaking suc-
cesses of the Civil Rights Movement and the assassinations and street
violence of the later 1960s and 1970s. This seemingly trivial event en-
capsulated questions of social unrest, freedom (artistic, consumer, and
civic), and the chances for a society without segregation along classist or
racial lines, and seemed to indicate to Hughes that all that he had be-
lieved in, and worked for, had failed. In response to this absurdity, Ask
Your Mama offers stringent critiques of American society while using
the communal ideals of experimental jazz to begin to sketch a new vision
of the social/political world.
The second section of this chapter considers the poetry of Nathaniel
Mackey, specifically sections of his serial poem entitled “Song of the
Andoumboulou.” Like Hughes, Mackey is a black poet writing in a
 Cryptic Versions  169
collage form, inspired by and responding to improvisatory jazz. As well,
he takes his sources and topics from the history of African cultures and
uses them to reflect on the contemporary world. Though both have pro-
duced examples of jazz-inspired collage poetics, at first glance, one might
justifiably conclude that the poetry of these two writers has little in com-
mon. On the contrary, I argue that both of these poets, through their
eschewal of the traditional “I” of lyric poetry, defy any expectation of
narrative or a recounting of personal experience or a tendency toward
solipsistic self-reflection. Rather, they develop idiosyncratic senses of
community, history, and memory in order to escape the confines of the
personal (as a place from which to speak) and to begin to move toward a
utopian ideal of the collective envisioned with the aid of music.
Mackey has described his own poetry as a kind of “transcendent
lyric,” one that allows the poet to escape what has become standard
practice for a large segment of contemporary poetry: the recounting
of personal experiences, during the course of which the speaker of the
poem is assumed to be identical with the poet.1 The nonacademic—that
is to say those who don’t read poetry as a profession—readers (and pur-
chasers) of contemporary poetry have, in recent years, been more likely
to read what is often called “minority” or “identity-driven” poetry. 2 As
American readers have sated their appetite for the direct transmission of
extreme experience, literature written by racial and ethnic minorities,
openly gay writers, and those living in politically oppressive regimes has
experienced an increasing popularity, one that is clearly based on a rea-
derly expectation of narrative content. Collage poetry rarely offers this
satisfaction. Mackey incorporates source material that ranges across cul-
tural, geographic, and temporal divides, and the perceived (and largely
realized) “difficulty” and “intellectualism” of the poetry can alienate
a reader searching for a one-to-one correspondence between sentiment
and author.
Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou” is inspired by aspects of the
Dogon cosmology.3 He here rejects the Western tradition of the lyric “I”
in favor of a more ancient form of lyric, taken from poetry’s original
function as song. Music as ritual fulfills a communal purpose—it calls
individuals together, whether, like the “Song of the Andoumboulou,”
for mourning or for celebration. It is a form of personal expression that
exceeds the individual. In this way, Mackey’s poetry can be called uto-
pian. Yet, this is a utopianism that does not insist on conformity, that
allows for individuality and difference, what he calls “othering” or “ver-
sioning.”4 A term taken from reggae music, “versioning” refers to “black
artistic practices that accent variance, variability,” such as the strain of
experimental jazz that includes bebop and hard bop. These musical prac-
tices were born out of the white appropriation of “swing” (symbolized
by the crowning of Benny Goodman as the “king of swing”). As swing
settled into a commodified form of jazz that emphasized large, profitable
170  Cryptic Versions
bands providing white audiences with standardized dance music, some
musicians developed experimental jazz forms in rebellion against this
instrumentalized, static approach to music. Bebop favored small, intense
combos whose emphasis was on improvisation, not standardization, and
who approached the music as an art form, not (just) entertainment.5 In
the “Song of the Andoumboulou,” Mackey performs this insistence on
variability by providing alternate versions of some of the poems, marked
with a thick black line separating the two. Thus, the reader can see for-
merly unimagined alternatives while reading, and see how even printed,
published poems can resist the hypostatization of form.
My insistence on both the differences and the similarities between
Mackey and Hughes is designed to serve two purposes in this book: one
is to expose some of the wide variance that collage poetics can take, even
when the subject matter and some of the source materials are similar;
the other is to de-emphasize the importance of identity-driven claims for
the categorization of poetry (and, by extension, other arts). The drive
toward the “personal experience” model in the poetry of identity has
muted poetry’s ability to offer what has been one of its historical func-
tions, historically and communally based political critique and commen-
tary.6 The work of Hughes and Mackey provides two varied examples of
how such poetry might appear.

*****

“How long must I wait?

Can I get it now?
Or must I hesitate?”
—Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz stands as an outlier in Langston

Hughes’s poetic oeuvre. This book-length work, a “long poem” in the
modernist sense in terms of its length and its ambition, defies expecta-
tions for both legibility and tone that Hughes had developed throughout
his lengthy and varied career. Which is to say, the poet laureate/“low
rate” of Harlem, famed for bringing demotic forms of the blues to
­A merican poetry, produced a complicated, “cryptic” collage poem for
his final original book.7 Ask Your Mama is a work on the forefront of
innovation in both the fields of music and poetry; its angry tone and po-
litical ambitions meet or exceed those of the soon-to-develop Black Arts
Movement of the later 1960s.
Despite the surprising innovations in both form and content, there is
a way in which Ask Your Mama continues Hughes’s interests in the con-
fluences of poetry, music, and politics that can be traced back to some
of his earliest writings. As Larry Scanlon describes it, Hughes’s poetic
innovations were not an absolute break with the past in the modernist
 Cryptic Versions  171
vein, but a break “with a dominant tradition in order to preserve and
continue a marginalized one” (45). Though Ask Your Mama represents
the high point of Hughes’s own experiments with the possibilities for
the uses of musical forms in poetry, these experiments can be seen as the
driving force behind his entire career. As early as his 1926 manifesto,
“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” he wished that “the blare
of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing
Blues [would] penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-­intellectuals
until they listen and perhaps understand” (694). Many critics have
claimed that his blues poetry of The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to
the Jew are Hughes’s greatest accomplishment as a poet. However, only
in the 1950s and 1960s do the two major features of his poetics, musical
forms and political content, come together integrally, and both his ma-
jor works of this period, Montage of a Dream Deferred and Ask Your
Mama, use a collage form to accomplish this integration. The collage
form of the work, combining music with political content, represents “a
convergence of various modes of thinking about poetry as performance”
that had been a part of his entire oeuvre (Carruthers 10). This work
has been undervalued in Hughes scholarship, and (until recently) almost
entirely overlooked in studies of experimental postwar poetry.8 While,
as I have noted, Hughes wrote in musical forms during his entire career,
it was only through his use of collage in Ask Your Mama that he was
able to incorporate fully his own ideals about the importance of black
popular music into his work. It is his most ambitious engagement with
musical form.
Despite these continuities with his earlier, blues-based poetics,
Hughes’s sudden changes to his poetic form begin to make sense only
when viewed in light of contextual events of the 1950s and 1960s. Two
traumatic events in Hughes’s life (and in the life of the nation) trans-
formed the poet of “Another ‘S’ in the USA” and “Good-bye Christ”
into the author of Ask Your Mama. The event that most directly
impacted Hughes’s composition of Ask Your Mama was his membership
on the Board of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1960, and attendance of
the festival as one of its emcees; the other was his appearance before
McCarthy’s Senate committee in 1953, a matter to which I’ll return
later. It is my contention that the combination of these two events, which
were transformative in Hughes’s poetics, produced three distinct and
important shifts in those poetics: an angry and sarcastic tone, showing a
newly evident lack of faith in basic American ideals; an eschewal of the
first person singular pronoun (the so-called lyric “I”); and a move away
from transparency, and toward crypticism, that is enabled by his use of
a juxtapositional collage form.9
But first, the Newport festival: years later, Hughes claimed to have
heard music as he began to draft Ask Your Mama in his hotel room in
Rhode Island.10 What is consistently left out of Hughes’s own accounts
172  Cryptic Versions
of the events is that it was not so much the positive, creative inspira-
tion of the music but rather an absurd parody of civil disobedience
that spurred him on to write the poem. A crowd of several thousand
would-be concert attendees (mostly intoxicated, young, white, and male)
had gathered outside the already packed concert grounds and angered
that they could not gain admission to the sold out headlining acts, forced
their way past the small contingent of police guarding the entrance to the
concert. ­Momentarily stymied from entering the concert itself by virtue
of a fire truck blocking their way, the crowd turned violent on the streets
outside. Brandishing beer bottles, tree limbs, and rocks, they turned first
on the police force, then on the town itself. In most immediate danger
were the famous “cottages” of Newport’s “Millionaire’s Row.” The po-
lice defended this strip of private property with a barrage of tear gas
and high-pressure water hoses. When the night was over, hundreds of
people had been arrested and/or injured, including police and concert
attendees. The governor of Rhode Island sent in the ­National Guard
to take control of the streets. The Newport city council sealed off the
city to all but longtime residents, and banned the sale of alcohol for a
period of two days. They also immediately canceled the rest of the fes-
tival and revoked its license. Hughes, who had been scheduled to emcee
the ­Sunday afternoon blues session, was put in the awkward position
of closing out the suddenly curtailed festival. For this, he wrote a song,
“Goodbye ­Newport Blues,” which he performed with Otis Spann and
Muddy ­Waters.11 Hughes ­consistently failed to mention the riots, or his
involvement with the festival, when discussing Ask Your Mama; his in-
sistence on the positive, “lyrical” notion of musical inspiration, as op-
posed to the negative instigation of violence, as the connection between
Ask Your Mama and the Newport Festival is a “cryptic” move designed
to hide his work’s intentions from readers whom he identified with the
Newport rioters.
The fact that Ask Your Mama was born from such tumult helps to
explain its anger and sarcasm. This tone is remarkable in Hughes’s oeu-
vre: not for the anger itself, as many of his youthful political poems had
been angry, but for the new lack of faith in the basic American ideals of
democracy, equality, and freedom. The events that transpired during the
Newport Jazz Festival laid bare the shocking conflict between the popu-
larity of black musical forms (as represented by the desire of so many to
attend the festival) and the intransigence of white society in the face of
black desire for legal and social equality (as represented by the events of
the Civil Rights Movement, of which the events at Newport were an ab-
surd mirror image). The suddenly apparent contrast between these two
incommensurable situations led the poet to create a work that would
not allow easy consumption by those—like the rioters at N ­ ewport—
for whom black music was only one more aspect of consumer culture
available for their digestion. The lesson that Hughes learned at Newport
 Cryptic Versions  173
would be one he would take to heart, and one that he would then at-
tempt to work through rigorously in Ask Your Mama.
The influence of Hughes’s experiences at Newport on the composi-
tion of Ask Your Mama is most clearly seen in his manifest desire to
create a gap between his text and such potential readers through his
use of a twinned set of parallel texts, poetic and musical; this is the
aspect of the text that can be described as “cryptic”.12 This is how
the poem resists narrativity, as well. By constructing the poem out of
a “cryptic” form of collage, Hughes disrupts the story about black
artistic (especially musical) production that members of white society, a
large portion of his usual reading audience, were already ready to hear.
The musical text is composed of what appears to be, on the surface,
performance notes. These extensive but loose directions indicate gen-
eral themes and styles as well as the rhythms and tempos of the music
to be played. Though many seemingly incongruent styles are employed,
the basis for them all are the associated techniques of improvisation
that had been pioneered by the experimental forms of post-bop jazz.13
In bebop (and jazz forms following it), the players improvise on a basic,
often well-known, melody, frequently to the extent that it is no longer
recognizable as such. A player demonstrates virtuosity by his ability to
take this improvisation far away from the original tune and still bring
it back in the end. Benjamin R. Lempert describes how Hughes’s exper-
imentation with musical forms in his late poetry led to “hermeneutic
opacity—a sense that bebop-inspired musicality might best be read as
a poem’s ensuring that it can’t be read properly, that its ‘musical’ com-
ponents are precisely those that evade hermeneutic capture” (314). This
sense of opacity—or what I’ve termed “crypticism”—allowed Hughes
to return to the politics of his poetry of the 1930s without the narrative
clarity that work entailed.
In linking his political poetry to jazz, Hughes was in good company.
Hard bop, the form of jazz most influential on Ask Your Mama, not only
came to fruition during the same period as the Civil Rights Movement
but it also developed as “its sonic alter ego.” Like the movement,

it worked through a kind of orchestrated disruption—a musical ver-

sion of what civil rights workers called “direct action,” which jazz
musicians experience as a rhythmic assertiveness and a newly taut
relation between the demands of composition and the possibilities
of improvisation.
(Saul 2–3)

Hughes’s attraction to hard bop was certainly derived from its retention
of bebop’s inventiveness while admitting the influence of older musical
forms such as gospel and the blues, as these had always been a major
part of his poetry.
174  Cryptic Versions
As he had previously done in Montage of a Dream Deferred, Hughes
once again makes use of a collage form in Ask Your Mama in order to
represent the innovations of bebop and post-bop jazz on the page. In
Montage, Hughes had employed collage primarily to facilitate the pres-
ence of multiple voices. Rather than presenting one poetic voice—the
consciousness of the individual poetic “speaker,” commonly referred to
as the lyric “I”—collage as a formal strategy allows the voice of the
community to come through, literally to “speak.” Montage makes use
of “juxtaposition, polyvocality, fragmentation, and other techniques as-
sociated with montage as well as bebop” in order to “plunge us into
the discontinuous experience of postwar Harlem” (Hollenbach 284).
Though there are many different consciousnesses represented in the text
of Montage, and many of these use the first person, singular pronoun,
none of them are the poet’s consciousness. Amid the splintering of the
poetic voice, it is Hughes’s use of the musical motifs of bebop that afford
coherence, much in the way that jazz improvisation may center on a
recognizable melody. In both of these late books, Hughes avoids using
markers on the page to designate the documentary nature of his texts.
Montage indicates the different voices of his various speakers by the use
of italic type, but nowhere does he specify the documentary origin of
many of the phrases and refrains that he uses in the text as a part of his
representation of the “voices” of the community.14
In Ask Your Mama, there are no “quotations” despite the documen-
tary nature of most of the material. (Hughes even uses italic type to
indicate individuals speaking in the body of the poem.) This is a part of
the work’s cryptic nature, which is, in part, a defense mechanism against
the white colonization (by musicians and fans) of jazz. John Lowney has
emphasized the use of juxtaposition in both Ask Your Mama and Mon-
tage, while maintaining that in Ask Your Mama

[t]he principle of juxtaposition engages the reader in an active pro-

cess of constructing meaning, of improvising within the gaps, while
simultaneously underscoring the potential for discord, for confu-
sion, even for unintelligibility, that applies to the reception of jazz as
well as to intercultural communication.
(566)

It is the “potential for discord” seen at the Newport Jazz Festival that
caused Hughes, in Ask Your Mama, to use a more intensely juxtapo-
sitional form of collage in the poetic text than Montage had, a docu-
mentary collage without the requisite citation that would allow a reader
to seek out the referents. This is what I term a “cryptic” collage. The
central point is that in both books, collage allows Hughes to break free
from the strictures of the personal as a space from which to perform a
political critique.15 The poetic forms that Hughes creates for his late
 Cryptic Versions  175
collage poetry deny the usual markers of talent and/or intellect that a
poet may claim for himself: invention and creativity on the one hand,
scholarship and knowledge on the other. They could almost be described
as modest, self-abnegating forms, if their striking experimentation and
originality didn’t run counter to our usual sense of these terms.
Despite this new, disjunctive form Hughes created for the text of his
poem, his consistent use of two thematic concerns—music and p ­ olitics—
brings a unity to the work. Moreover, Ask Your Mama brings together
these themes in a manner that is remarkable for the depth to which form
and content inform and speak to one another. Both literally musical and
about music and its import to the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, Ask
Your Mama integrates music as accompaniment, theme, content, and
reference. The years intervening between Montage and Ask Your Mama
were the occasion for the second traumatic event that provoked Hughes’s
shift in voice and tone. His experience appearing before McCarthy’s
Senate committee provided a great deal of motivation for the intensified
interrelation among Hughes’s poetry and both black popular music and
political critique; it also precipitated a shift in his tactics for writing
politically motivated poetry. The riots at Newport were of course the
other event, and the capstone on a decade that led to a drastic shift in
his compositional practice.16 Hughes’s eschewal of the lyric “I” signals
a failure—in the newly tense atmosphere of the Cold War—of his past
strategy of writing political poetry from the vantage point of the individ-
ual. Collage provided Hughes with a form within which he could begin
to incorporate some of the communal and yet competitive ideals of jazz
into his political poetry, and Ask Your Mama was the result.17
As a text, Ask Your Mama was born out of music, and written to
be read with music.18 After the title page, there is a page of musical
­notation—the music to “Hesitation Blues (Traditional)”—and the fol-
lowing note, lineated like a poem:

The traditional folk melody of the “Hesitation Blues”

is the leitmotif for this poem. In and around it,
along with the other recognizable melodies employed,
there is room for spontaneous jazz improvisation,
particularly between verses,
where the voice pauses.
The musical figurine indicated after each “Ask your mama” line
may incorporate the impudent little melody of the old break,
“Shave and a haircut, fifteen cents.”
(475)

Throughout the text, there are extensive marginal notes directing the
musicians toward the mood and broad musical style that the music
should evoke. Hard bop, which evolved from bebop, is an innovative
176  Cryptic Versions
musical style that combines the traditional elements of black popular
music forms with newer, experimental ones, as well as the formulaic
elements with the improvisational ones.
Black musicians initially developed these fresh and “difficult” jazz
forms to reclaim jazz from its development, primarily by white musicians
in large, profitable orchestras, into swing. If white players “stole” jazz
from them, bebop was one way of stealing it back. As Lowney notes, this
shift in style had an economic benefit as well as an artistic or moral one:
“While bebop may have sounded militant under these repressive circum-
stances [the vice squad infiltrations of jazz clubs], it was first and fore-
most a product of African American professionals who were struggling
to make a living” (367). Bebop was designed to be a discordant, esoteric,
intellectual art form—one that would discourage the dilettante, and that
would in fact make his status as dilettante evident instantly.19 The shift
in Hughes’s poetry similarly follows this trajectory: from the innovative,
but ultimately narrative and relatively easy to follow, style of Montage
to the overdetermined, staccato, and cryptic rush of words in Ask Your
Mama. This shift to a style that is fundamentally anti-narrative, in its
effort to disrupt the stories that portions of his audience were already
too ready to hear, provides evidence of his sudden cynicism with respect
to his attempts to provide a digestible form of socially aware poetry that
would be well received by the liberal white reading public. Simultane-
ously, though, this work denotes a desire to continue to produce politi-
cal poetry, even in an environment that was newly hostile (or, perhaps,
just hostile in new ways) to this desire. While his previous political po-
etry had always maintained a clear and evident faith in American ideals
of democracy, equality, and freedom, we can see in Ask Your Mama a
newly revealed cynicism putting that belief to the test.
Hughes’s new cynicism is evident in the lack of direct citations in the
poetic text of Ask Your Mama, one of the most important ways in which
it can be described as “cryptic.”20 This collage form presumes a store of
common knowledge, not in the intelligentsia or educated elite, but in an
urban, black audience who could be trusted to recognize and respond
to the history of their community, their culture, and, particularly, the
intersection of the Civil Rights Movement and the entertainment indus-
try in both. This is a kind of citation: Hughes assumes that, simply by
mentioning a name, his audience will make the requisite links and con-
nections. If they do not, the poem often fails to make sense—and the
speed with which the poem moves through a sometimes stunning array
of names and events makes this an even more daunting task. The cryp-
tic impulse behind the poetic text contains a sense of knowledge that
is largely hidden to many of the readers who had supported Hughes’s
career in the past. Only those already “in the know” have access to it. 21
Without the presence of the musical text, which “embed[s] the story of
how black music has been conceptualized as survival strategy,” into the
text, Ask Your Mama would be almost entirely lacking in the desire to
 Cryptic Versions  177
reach out to a larger community that had been a major component of
Hughes’s early career (Marcoux 41).
Ask Your Mama opens with a section entitled “Cultural Exchange”:
lyrical description interweaves with fantastic and nightmarish images to
create a sense of dislocation. Hughes here uses collage poetics to provoke
a shock of dislocation, necessitating the question “where are we now?”
This shock forces the reader instantly out of his sense of security or
entitlement. “Cultural Exchange” works like a miniature version of the
poem as a whole, running through many of the themes and phrases that
will be repeated later. This pattern begins with the opening lines: “IN
THE/IN THE QUARTER/IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES”
(ll. 1–3). These lines situate the poem in a tradition of sentimental lyri-
cism concerning the lives of lower-class black Americans, a sentimental-
ity that will soon be exposed as false. In enacting, and then refusing, this
easy sentimentality, the poem challenges its readers not to assume that
life was better when it was simpler, that is, before the racial strife and
violence of the Civil Rights Movement. The phrase “in the quarter of
the negroes” is repeated throughout the poem, as one of several refrains
to which Hughes returns, allowing the poem to refer insistently to the
contemporary problems of integration. The musical directions at this
point call for “the rhythmically rough scraping of a guira” followed by
“a lonely flute call, high and far away” (477). From the beginning, the
musical text mixes standard Western music with non-Western or folk
elements. The “rhythmic rough scraping” of the guira rather than, say,
a guitar or banjo frustrates expectations and thus forbids any tempta-
tion to the sentimentality that the text recalls. 22 This juxtaposition of
the folk or non-Western elements with the more conventional elements
of music—as opposed to the channeling (and, thus, the taming) of the
folk elements through the classical—recalls the rift torn in the Harlem
Renaissance forty years previous over the use of the blues and jazz in
art. Hughes uses the music—rather than the poetic text—to provide his
answer; thus, the music takes on a pedagogic function.
The question of “representation,” political and aesthetic, recurs
throughout the poem. In this section, Hughes names black entertainers
as “representative” figures:

THERE, FORBID US TO REMEMBER,

COMES AN AFRICAN IN MID-DECEMBER
SENT BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT
AMONG THE SHACKS TO MEET THE BLACKS:
LEONTYNE SAMMY HARRY POITIER
LOVELY LENA MARIAN LOUIS PEARLIE MAE
(ll. 23–8)23

These figures from entertainment—classical, jazz, and popular music, as

well as film—are, in the world of this poem, taken as “representative”
178  Cryptic Versions
black Americans who can act as such in an official capacity, that of
meeting an African ambassador. They are, in a sense, “ambassadors” of
the cultural nation. The cryptic, juxtapositional collage method of the
poem creates synecdochal markers out of their names, marking both the
people themselves, as well as their entire industry. The names are juxta-
posed one next to the other, and each figure is given only one name (either
first or last). The effect of stringing “LEONTYNE SAMMY HARRY
POITIER” together is to create one name out of four—thus quadrupling
the representative function each figure is asked to play in the culture at
large. 24 The government is portrayed as collaborating with the enter-
tainment industry to substitute the placement of a few black Americans
in highly public roles for the demands of the Civil Rights Movement for
equal treatment and opportunities for all black Americans. The poem
presciently illustrates the fallacy of allowing simplistic ideas of (what we
would now call) pluralism or multiculturalism to substitute for material
changes in the welfare of communities; just as renaming the street signs
in a neighborhood does not mean that there is sufficient food or heat
inside its houses, neither does the presence of black celebrities in the
public eye signify that any real change has taken place in national racial
politics. The musical cue calls for a gradual change “into old-time tradi-
tional 12-bar blues up strong between verses until African drums throb
against blues…” (478). As the text presents the juxtaposition of the rep-
resentatives of Africa with those of black American culture, so the music
juxtaposes African rhythms with the blues performed on Western in-
struments, one reminiscent of the basic elements of jazz.
From the glamorous world of black celebrities, the poem transitions
to the tumultuous politics of African, and other, nations in the process
of ending colonial rule:

IN THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES

NKRUMAH
IN THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES
NASSER NASSER
IN THE SHADOW OF THE NEGROES
ZIK AZIKIWE
CUBA CASTRO GUINEA TOURÉ
FOR NEED OR PROPAGANDA
KENYATTA
AND THE TOM DOGS OF THE CABIN
THE COCOA AND THE CANE BREAK
THE CHAIN GANG AND THE SLAVE BLOCK
TARRED AND FEATHERED NATIONS
SEAGRAM’S AND FOUR ROSES
$5.00 BAGS A DECK OR DAGGA.
FILIBUSTER VERSUS VETO
 Cryptic Versions  179
LIKE A SNAPPING TURTLE—
WON’T LET GO UNTIL IT THUNDERS
WON’T LET GO UNTIL IT THUNDERS
(ll. 63–91)25

At this point, the musical notation instructs,

Delicate lieder on piano continues between verses to merge softly

into the melody of the ‘Hesitation Blues,’ asking its haunting ques-
tion, ‘How long must I wait? Can I get it now—or must I hesitate?’
Suddenly the drums roll like thunder as the music ends sonorously.
TACIT.
(479–80)

This is perhaps the clearest use of the musical text to make a political
point. It also demonstrates that the musical text, despite appearances, is
not truly meant for use by musicians in a performance. It is a section of
the work’s text, equal to that of the poetry, and purely for the benefit of
readers. That is, it is there for those reading the poem in a book, not for
musicians performing the poem’s score. Hughes not only provides direc-
tions toward producing music, he also explicates the music (as one might
more commonly do with a poem) for the reader/listener. The version
of the “Hesitation Blues” that was printed in the opening pages of Ask
Your Mama as well as in the manuscript sources he was working from
has no words.26 He elaborates the meaning of the song in order to expli-
cate his poetic text—black America is losing patience with the manner
in which white America is responding to its protests. This reading of the
poetic text is not fully present if one reads it on its own. His citation of
the leaders of the new governments of Ghana, Egypt, Nigeria, Cuba, and
Kenya functions as a warning and a loosely veiled threat to the leaders
of the United States who would ignore the Civil Rights Movement and
what will become the Black Power movement.
In an example of the ambitious scope of the poem, directly after this
section on insurrection and revolt is a brief interlude that returns to the
United States, most likely to a street corner or a school playground. It
contains the first instance of the use of the title phrase in the text:

AND THEY ASKED ME RIGHT AT CHRISTMAS

IF MY BLACKNESS WOULD IT RUB OFF?
I SAID ASK YOUR MAMA.
(ll. 85–7)

The phrase, “ask your mama,” is a reference to “the dozens,” the black
street ritual of insult. 27 Rivals trade barbs rather than blows; the win-
ner reduces the loser to silence and shame. Hughes’s poetic example of
180  Cryptic Versions
how the dozens function is typical in that it includes a sexual reference:
here, the title phrase of the book, “ask your mama” makes reference
to the implication that the speaker has been sexually intimate with his
respondent’s mother. However, by combining this sexual insult with a
racial one—the reference to “rubbing” contains both ideas—Hughes
transforms the very nature of the dozens. Here, the speaker utilizes the
refrain as a reply to white America’s ignorance or cruelty. This refrain
functions, as expected, as a substitute for physical violence. However,
Hughes has shifted the register of this ritual from one of intra-racial
taunting—where the stakes were relatively low, in that the dozens were
supposed to be a substitute for physical violence, whereby actually strik-
ing an opponent was the surest sign of defeat—to a show of interracial
defiance. In this way, Hughes develops a response to white paranoia
about the possibility of a black “take over”:

[This response] was an innovative one, and it also suggested new

possibilities for the bravado of black resistance…. Hughes held up
the possibility that, at least in poetry, you might speak in ghetto ver-
nacular without adopting the common minstrel roles… [Y]ou might
address white paranoia not through denial but through a peculiar
form of insult where you laughed off your enemy’s worst fears.
(Saul 141–2)

As Scott Saul notes, the stance taken by the speaker of Ask Your Mama,
who is a type of “free floating” consciousness, lacking any personally
defining traits outside of his position as a transhistorical spokesperson
for black Americans, anticipates the “bravado of black resistance” of the
Black Arts/Black Power Movement, but maintains the sense of humor
that Hughes has always used as a part of his writing. This nameless, fea-
tureless poetic consciousness lies in contrast to the litany of names that
Hughes cites throughout the text: names of politicians and protestors,
musicians and movie stars, all of whose names have value as names. It
seems that the speaker of the poem is one of the few individuals in the
text who does not have a name, and that this namelessness gives him a
type of freedom, one not dissimilar to the nameless narrator of Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man. Hughes here opens up a new place from which
to speak, outside of the confines of the personal—or of the cruel choice
between debilitating cultural stereotypes and near-invisible subversion.
This poetic consciousness, and its stance of defiance, provides an exam-
ple of a way out of not only the double bind of rebellion versus subver-
sion, but also the “representativeness” marked by the black celebrities
(and, in a sense, by Hughes himself) named in Ask Your Mama. De-
spite Hughes’s deep suspicions, clearly evident from the tone of the entire
poem, concerning American ideals and their potential for changing the
lives of black Americans, here we can see a willingness to work toward
some kind of change, no matter how that change might be achieved.
 Cryptic Versions  181
What that change might entail becomes clear by the time we reach the
crescendo of “Cultural Exchange.” The speaker here iterates a fantasy/
nightmare about a South of reverse-apartheid where black Americans
are in control:

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES…

NIGHTMARES…DREAMS! OH!
DREAMING THAT THE NEGROES
OF THE SOUTH HAVE TAKEN OVER—
VOTED ALL THE DIXIECRATS
RIGHT OUT OF POWER—
COMES THE COLORED HOUR:
MARTIN LUTHER KING IS GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA
DR. RUFUS CLEMENT HIS CHIEF ADVISOR,
ZELMA WATSON GEORGE THE HIGH GRAND WORTHY.
IN WHITE PILLARED MANSIONS
SITTING ON THEIR WIDE VERANDAS,
WEALTHY NEGROES HAVE WHITE SERVANTS,
WHITE SHARECROPPERS WORK THE BLACK
PLANTATIONS,
AND COLORED CHILDREN HAVE WHITE MAMMIES:

MAMMY FAUBUS
MAMMY EASTLAND
MAMMY PATERSON
DEAR, DEAR DARLING OLD WHITE MAMMIES—
SOMETIMES EVEN BURIED WITH OUR FAMILY!
DEAR OLD
MAMMY FAUBUS!
CULTURE, THEY SAY, IS A TWO-WAY STREET:
HAND ME MY MINT JULEP, MAMMY.
MAKE HASTE!
(ll. 88–112)28

This revolution is accomplished through democratic means (VOTED

ALL THE DIXIECRATS / RIGHT OUT OF POWER), and the real
possibility of these events occurring is blocked “only” by the realities
of the Southern refusal to allow black voters to exercise their constitu-
tional rights. It is also the clearest moment of utopian thinking in the
poem. We have here an implicit plan for black revolt in the South; at the
same time, this vision serves, by way of reversal, to ridicule the combina-
tion of sentimentality and rationalization that served to consolidate the
Southern apartheid system. 29 The indeterminate status of the passage
is underlined by its music, the most provocative and clever use of music
in the poem. The musical directions read, “Figure impishly into ‘Dixie’
ending in high shrill flute call. TACIT.” and at the end of the section,
182  Cryptic Versions
“‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ joyously for two full choruses with
maracas” (480–1). These musical notations reinforce and sharpen the
impact of the words. As a Southern American musical “standard,” the
song “Dixie” performs a type of citational work here within the po-
etic and musical structures of the text. This is an example of the work-
ings of Hughes’s cryptic version of collage, which relies on the cultural
knowledge of his audience: he assumes that they will be able to recall
the (unspoken) lines of the song: “Oh I wish that I were in the land of
cotton/ Old times there are not forgotten/ Look away, Look away, Look
away, Dixieland.” The interaction between the poetic text and the mu-
sical one gives new meaning to the words of this song, which remain
elided. As the speaker’s vision is consolidated in the description of the
relationship between the black dignitaries and their white “mammies”
(who are represented by staunch segregationists James O. Eastland and
Orval Faubus, serving time in a kind of Dantean hell), the music segues
from “Dixie” to “When the Saints Go Marching In,” from white South-
ern folk to black spiritual, from ironic reversal to joyous celebration.
Of course, this is only a dream—or a nightmare. The quotation from
“When the Saints Go Marching In” surely proposes the notion that only
in an afterlife would such a reversal take place, a citational reminder of
the many spirituals in which death is seen as the only possible release
from slavery. Yet, the use of spirituals in the Civil Rights Movement
(including “When the Saints Go Marching In”) suggests that such spiri-
tually based claims for social justice had real purchase, and held within
them potential for change. 30
The integration of music and politics in Ask Your Mama extends be-
yond the use of musical forms to perform a political critique. In fact,
the text as a whole is a meditation on music and politics, and the pol-
itics of black music, as well as the larger issue of black celebrities in
the entertainment industry and their impact on integration. The section
entitled “Bird in Orbit” is rife with allusions to jazz musicians like Char-
lie “Bird” Parker, as well as figures across the gamut of black popular
music, the arts, the Civil Rights Movement, and Hughes’s personal life.
His collage method allows the poem to move rapidly from the glamorous
world of entertainment, to the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement
and back again, forcing the reader into a consideration of how these two
methods of gaining “representation” work. To quote the poem:

DE—
DELIGHT—
DELIGHTED! INTRODUCE ME TO EARTHA
JOCKO BODDIDLY LIL GREENWOOD
BELAFONTE FRISCO JOSEPHINE
BRICKTOP INEZ MABEL MERCER
AND I’D LIKE TO MEET THE
 Cryptic Versions  183
ONE-TIME SIX-YEAR-OLDS
FIRST GRADE IN NEW ORLEANS
IN THE QUARTER OF THE NEGROES
WHERE SIT-INS ARE CONDUCTED
BY THOSE YET UNINDUCTED
AND BALLOTS DROP IN BOXES
WHERE BULLETS ARE THE TELLERS.

THEY ASKED ME AT THANKSGIVING

DID I VOTE FOR NIXON?
I SAID, VOTED FOR YOUR MAMA.
(ll. 1–17)

The movement in this section, from a round of celebrity meet-and-greets

to the sit-ins and the struggle to achieve black voting rights in the South
(the crucial missing ingredient from the plan for revolt put forth in the
previous section), creates a sense of a shock derived from two contrasting
and juxtaposed images, one on the model of a Benjaminian dialectical
image. Hughes was a strong advocate of the importance of the arts, and
particularly music, in the Civil Rights Movement. As early as his “Negro
Artist” essay, he promoted the use of art forms for political and educa-
tional purposes, as well as aesthetic ones. However, in Ask Your Mama,
there is a clear consideration of the contrast between the lives of those in
the entertainment world and those on the front lines of the current politi-
cal struggle. He wrote a history of the NAACP, entitled Fight for Freedom
that came out in 1962, only one year after Ask Your Mama; the question
of the efficacy of protest in art as opposed to direct political action was
much on his mind during this late part of his career.31 This section re-
peats his suspicions from earlier in the work concerning the possibility
that the presence of celebrities in the public eye could be seen as a sign of
real progress toward social equality—and as a distraction from the “fight
for freedom” that the Civil Rights Movement was currently engaged in.
These two things, Hughes unequivocally declares, are not equal.
While Hughes is well known for his investment in leftist politics during
the 1930s, the general consensus has been that in the period during and
after World War II, his political activity and writings were greatly re-
duced, for reasons that are abundantly clear. Hughes’s precise views on
Communism will most likely never be known; however, given some of
the content of Ask Your Mama, it seems likely that his 1953 testimony
before McCarthy’s committee was neither as “sincere” nor as “frank” as
it had been commonly taken to be.32

THOSE SIT-IN KIDS, HE SAID,

MUST BE RED!
KENYATTA RED! CASTRO RED!
184  Cryptic Versions
NKRUMAH RED!
RALPH BUNCHE INVESTIGATED!
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE BARRED BY
THE LEGION FROM ENGLEWOOD
NEW JERSEY HIGH SCHOOL!
HOW ABOUT THAT NAACP
AND THE RADICALS IN THAT
THERE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE?
AIN’T YOU GOT NO INFORMATION
ON DR. ROBERT WEAVER?
INVESTIGATE THAT SANTA CLAUS
WHOSE DOLLS ARE INTERRACIAL!
INVESTIGATE THEM NEGRAS WHO
BOUGHT A DOBERMAN PINSCHER.
(ll. 71–87)

In the chilling atmosphere of Cold War paranoia, everyone (nonviolent

protesters, black government and community leaders, philanthropists,
even ordinary women protecting themselves) is suspected of being a
Communist. Hughes’s own experience before McCarthy’s committee
is the driving and yet cryptically unstated content. In this testimony,
Hughes repudiated his former affiliation with Communist ideology, his
“views,” and his “artistic technique,” of the 1930s. 33 The use of a juxta-
positional collage technique in his poetry allows Hughes, in a tense Cold
War atmosphere, to perform a political critique as he had in his more
openly political writing of the past, but without incurring criticism, or at
least further criticism: he was heavily attacked in the mainstream media
throughout the 1950s for his past leftist leanings and affiliations. This
section provides a clear example of the way that collage, particularly the
type of non-citational, cryptic collage of Ask Your Mama, can allow the
artist an unusual amount of freedom to be critical, whether of society or
an individual, without necessarily bearing the brunt of the force of that
criticism under his own name.
“Bird in Orbit” ends with Hughes’s critique of the exploitation of
black musicians by those in the music industry:

THAT GENTLEMAN IN EXPENSIVE SHOES

MADE FROM THE HIDES OF BLACKS
TIPS AMONG THE SHADOWS
SOAKING UP THE MUSIC….
MUSIC….
(ll. 88–92)

Often, in the early days of what was called “race music,” the musicians
themselves received little or none of the profits their efforts generated.
 Cryptic Versions  185
This “gentleman”—in the folk tradition, the “gentleman” was a term for
a demon or even the devil—profits from the artistry of the musicians,
literally wears the profits generated by their bodies on his own, and then
abandons them. While the 1950s did bring positive changes to the music
business in this respect, Hughes here recalls the earlier, flagrant abuses
(particularly of blues musicians) as a sort of warning to contemporary
black musicians. Hughes was not strictly opposed to the commercializa-
tion of black art in the same way that, for instance, Zora Neale Hurston
was; however, his warning to the musicians, as well as to other artists,
is that they should not trust anyone’s extravagant or exceptional prom-
ises. When the “gentleman” appears previously, it is to ask the speaker
“RIGHT AT CHRISTMAS / DID I WANT TO EAT WITH WHITE
FOLKS?” (ll. 69–70) So soon before the previous section about the
“sit-in kids,” Hughes presents a strong contrast between the glamorous
world of entertainers who might occasionally be allowed to transgress
the laws of Jim Crow, and that of the Civil Rights volunteers who risk
their lives for the right to eat at a lunch counter. There is a twofold warn-
ing in this section to black musicians. The economic warning states that
they should not let themselves be exploited by those in the entertainment
business, while the ethical one states that they should not confuse special
“privileges” offered by such “gentlemen” with the situation in the world
at large. The poem again returns to the question of the dual meanings of
“representation,” where black artists who allow themselves to become
“representative” artists and fall prey to the special exceptions that such
representativeness can bring, who thus forego any part in the “fight for
freedom” of the Civil Rights Movement, may find themselves used and
left financially, not to mention ethically, destitute once the fickle enter-
tainment industry no longer has a place for them.
The conflicting notions of the American ideal of freedom—whether
that word referred to the artistic freedom of the musician, the con-
sumer freedom of the potential concert attendee, or the civic freedom
of those marching for the Civil Rights Movement—come into direct
conflict in the poem, as they had for Hughes during the Newport Jazz
Festival. Seemingly, these three notions of freedom cannot coexist: the
demands of the consumer to attend the concert despite the lack of avail-
able tickets (that is, to lay claim to what is a logical extension of the
basic premises of capitalism, that the individual can and should have
access to whatever she may want as long as she can pay for it) conflict
directly with the desire of the musician for artistic freedom. Though the
Civil Rights Movement was fighting for basic civil liberties for black
­A mericans, the movement also insisted that black Americans deserved
the same access to this type of consumer freedom that white Americans
did, the right to spend their money as they saw fit. The simultane-
ous intransigence of the white American power structure to recognize
the claims of black Americans for equality in basic civic rights like
186  Cryptic Versions
voting, even as the realm of consumer freedom was expanding, caused
Hughes’s formerly idealistic poetry to take on a cynical, angry, and
confrontational tone, one deeply suspicious of the efficaciousness of
older models of achieving social and political change. But despite the
traumas that Hughes suffered in front of McCarthy’s committee, and
at the Newport Festival, his poetry still retains the utopian impulse
that has been evident since his “Negro Artist” essay, one that hopes
and works for a better world, no matter how radical a change may be
necessary to accomplish that dream.

*****

“The song says the dead will not ascend without song.”
—Nathaniel Mackey,
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 1”

Nathaniel Mackey’s formal and musical innovations in lyric are pred-

icated on the central notion of “another voice”: “This business of the
pursuit of another voice, an alternate voice… is very much a part of the
African American musical tradition, very much a part of the African
musical tradition” (“Cante Moro” 193). The pursuit of this alternate
voice (outside of the poet’s own voice) is the means of achieving what
he has described as a type of “transcendent lyric,” one that explores
“subjective access to modes of being prior to personal experience” (“In-
terview with Edward Foster” 268). The two parts of this descriptor—the
“lyric” and the “transcendent”—each mark out a significant aspect of
the poetry. “Lyric” is a commonly used word to describe a certain type
of poetry; Mackey’s poetry does not fit the typical notion of a “lyric”
poem, and yet the term is an essential part of understanding his in-
flection of the term utopian as “blutopian.” While lyric poetry is often
thought to have originated with nineteenth-century Romanticism, the
roots of lyric go back much farther than the nineteenth century, and it is
this pre-Romantic notion of lyric that is relevant for a consideration of
Mackey’s poetry, one that uses the ideals of music in order to begin to
construct a utopian-based vision of the collective, or what he, following
Duke Ellington, has termed the “blutopic.”34 This “blutopic” aesthetic
is accomplished by combining poetry’s most ancient functions—as song,
and as a repository of myth, history, and memory—and some of its most
innovative recent forms, most strikingly, those derived from collage and
experimental jazz. The “transcendent” part of the “transcendent lyric”
involves a desire for poetry to be free from

the immersion in the subjective and the personal. Records of expe-

rience that are part of the communal and collective inheritance that
we have access to even though we have not personally experienced
 Cryptic Versions  187
those things are prior to one’s own experience in the sense of pre-
ceding what one personally experiences, while also being available
to one’s personal experience in the world.
(“Interview with Edward Foster” 268)

Mackey claims that his poetry can get away from what has been the
hallmark of Western lyric poetry since Romanticism: the lyric “I,” the
personal, individual speaker who, as a solitary, self-sustaining man is
connected to, if not identical with, the individuals of representative de-
mocracy and capitalism. The “transcendent lyric” asks for and addresses
“another voice.” It is this “other voice” that is needed to make manifest
the juxtapositional force of collage.
In order to elucidate this concept, I will examine a prose section from
Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou,” which exists as letters from
“N.” to the “Angel of Dust.”35 The reader enters in the midst of an on-
going conversation:

Dear Angel of Dust,

In one of your earlier letters, the one you wrote in response to
Song of the Andoumboulou: 3, you wrote of sorting out “what
speaks of speaking of something, and what (more valuably) speaks
from something, i.e., where the source is available, becomes a
re-source rather than something evasive, elusive, sought after.
(Eroding Witness 50)

This “letter” cuts to the heart of the questions of documentary collage,

citationality, and crypticism. We see the two sides of collage: the “Angel
of Dust” arguing (through the reportage of “N.”) for direct transmission
of a source as provided in most documentary collage—strict citationality.
The source should be present on the page as a “re-source,” its hiddenness
banished in pursuit of a greater goal, presumably, truth. “N.” disagrees:

We not only can but should speak of “loss” or, to avoid, quotation
marks notwithstanding, any such inkling of self-pity, speak of ab-
sence as unavoidably an inherence in the texture of things (dream-
seed, habitual cloth). You really do seem to believe in, to hold out
hope for, some first or final gist underlying it all, but my preoccu-
pation with origins and ends is exactly that: a pre- (equally post-, I
suppose) occupation…. What was wanted least but now comes to be
missed is that very absence, an unlikely Other whose inconceivable
occupancy glimpses of oceans beg access to.
Not “resource” for me so much as “re: Source.”
Yours,
N.
(Eroding Witness 50)
188  Cryptic Versions
“N.” seeks a relationship with the source that approximates unrequited
love: the “source” is that elusive object of desire, always somewhat
mysterious, whose pursuit is an end unto itself, productive of desire,
knowledge, and art. Thus, N. is able to view the poem as a part of a
“correspondence with an interlocutor, not on the futile search for an
identity in origins” (Jenkins, “re:source” 36). “N.” takes an evocative
stance toward his sources, via this notion of the “interlocutor,” while the
“Angel of Dust” argues for an instrumental one that is more amenable to
pedagogy, to poetry that is political in the traditional sense.
This letter functions as a form of poetics. According to Mackey, the
first letter was written in response to a letter from a friend questioning
him about his poetry, though the letter was not written to his friend but
rather one to which he allowed his friend access. 36 This section utilizes
the resources of collage as a formal strategy but also in its motivation.
Despite the protestations against more instrumental uses of collage, the
inclusion of this piece of poetics performs an act of preservation and
remembrance, and an insistence on the importance of his poetics to the
overall project of the series-to-be, “Song of the Andoumboulou.”
These two different ways of understanding the use of sources can
be further elaborated through two concepts that he has developed as
twinned ideals for his poetic practice, the “whole” and the “edge.” In an
essay entitled, “On Edge,” he writes:

To bring separation back into the picture is to observe that the edge
is still a cutting edge…. The old and new truth of the incision is that
one is profoundly and inescapably cut off and cut into by differ-
ences. The edge is where differences intersect, where we witness and
take part in is a traffic of partialities, where half-truths or partial
wisdom converse, contend, interlock.
(260)

The importance of the “whole” is that it is inclusive and noninstrumen-

tal: utopian in the traditional sense. The “edge” insists on the “othering”
of the source of inspiration, and is the source of the poet’s access to
difference (what he likes to term “discrepancy”). Othering is Mackey’s
term for “black linguistic and musical practices that accent variance,
variability—what reggae musicians call ‘versioning’” (“Other” 266).
His use of “other” as a verb rather than a noun, as an active, engaged
practice rather than a fixed subject position, is a part of this practice of
poetics that refuses the choice between the “edge” and the “whole.” As
Mackey explains,

Such othering practices implicitly react against and reflect critically

upon the different sort of othering to which their practitioners, de-
nied agency in a society by which they are designated other, are
 Cryptic Versions  189
subjected. The black speaker, writer or musician whose practice
privileges variation subjects the fixed equations that underwrite that
denial (including the idea of fixity itself) to an alternative.
(“Other” 267)

The direct inspiration for his essay, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” is the
description by Amiri Baraka (written as LeRoi Jones) in Blues People of
the shift in the use of the word “swing” from “verb to noun” as large
white orchestras increasingly became the mainstream in jazz. These or-
chestras, rather than playing music that “swings,” a term of approbation
among black jazz musicians, played “swing” music, a commodified form
of jazz. The reaction against “swing” (as described in the earlier sections
of this chapter) inspired experimental forms of post-bop jazz. These jazz
forms that emphasize difference (primarily through modes of improvi-
sation) over traditional musical forms (or sometimes through traditional
musical forms, when these forms are used as a basis for the improvisa-
tion) provide the basic structure for Mackey’s poetic forms.
In Mackey’s (and Baraka’s) writings, we can see parallels to those of
Ernest Fenollosa on the Chinese written character, the “big essay on
verbs,” that led Ezra Pound to his development of the theory of the ideo-
gram.37 Fenollosa insists on the primacy of the verb in relation to the
noun, that every noun in fact implies a verb and that the two are insepa-
rable in nature. The English language’s tendency toward abstraction and
categorization is what Pound/Fenollosa write against. As in Baraka’s
analysis of the movement from swing music to bebop, Mackey’s use of a
similar formulation is likewise aimed against stasis, the freezing of mu-
sic, poetry, or other arts into a profitable or satisfactory, but ultimately
empty form:

“From verb to noun” means the erasure of a black inventiveness

by white appropriation…. The “noun,” white commodification, ob-
scures or “disappears” the “verb” it rips off, black agency, black
authority, black invention…. “From verb to noun” means, on
the aesthetic level, a less dynamic, less improvisatory, less blues-­
influenced music, and, on the political level, a containment of black
mobility, a containment of the economic and social advances that
might accrue to black artistic innovation. The domain of action and
the ability to act suggested by verb is closed off by the hypostasis,
paralysis and arrest suggested by noun, the confinement to a prede-
termined status….
(“Other” 267)

One way to combat this hypostasis is through “othering.” Mackey’s take

on othering in poetry involves, as we will see, different versions of poems
inserted into the book one after the other but separated by a solid black
190  Cryptic Versions
horizontal line. The alternate versions are “below the line.” The access
to difference is, in one sense, a refusal of the type of teleology inscribed
by the notion of “revision”: a writer works on a poem, going through
different versions until, presumably, the “best” or at least “final” version
is reached, and that one is what is available as the published version,
with the rest relegated to the archive (if that). These alternate versions
of poems are one example of how he refuses the devolution of language
into a static, commodified art form in his poetry, and are an example of
his use of juxtapositional collage forms. Through this refusal of stasis,
his poetry achieves a similar form of anti-narrativity to that discussed
earlier in this chapter. Even as work in progress, most poetry does not
exist purely in time in the way that improvisational music may—and
Mackey’s poetry does not partake in those aspects of contemporary po-
etry that do exist purely in time, such as slam or ­performance-based
poetry—but these experiments in “othering” are one way in which he
may maintain access to the discrepancy that can still be a part of lan-
guage, even on the printed page.38 While the poetry consistently displays
a utopic longing, it also displays a simultaneous understanding that uto-
pia (no-place) will never be reached, and can never be reached. Mackey
has recognized this dual force even within his recourse to the serial for-
mat in his writings:

Circularity, a figure for wholeness, also connotes boundedness.

Recursiveness can mark a sense of deprivation fostered by failed
advance, a sense of alarm and insufficiency pacing a dark, even
desperate measure, but this dark accent or inflection issues from a
large appetite or better—invoking Duke Ellington’s neologism—a
blutopic appetite. Seriality’s mix of utopic ongoingness and recur-
sive constraint is blutopic, an idealism shaped or shaded by blue,
in-between foreboding, blue, dystopic apprehension of the way the
world is.
(“Preface,” Splay Anthem xiv)

The serial form’s offering of “ongoingness,” as the poet describes it, even
within the inherent boundedness of the published manuscript is another
example of how he attempts to access what I will generally term “differ-
ence” on the printed page. It is the access to “difference” (transcendence,
“another voice,” or discrepancy are all terms he uses) that Mackey
achieves primarily through the formal innovations of music. The crucial
contribution of musical forms (primarily those of improvisational jazz)
to his poetry is in the ability to speak for others without resorting to a
smoothing over or quieting of difference among and between people:
this is how the poetry may be “blutopic.”

*****
 Cryptic Versions  191
The serial format is important to Mackey: as he states in his discus-
sion of the “blutopian,” seriality may imply both a nod toward repeti-
tion and toward revision. His six full-length books of poetry, Eroding
Witness (1986), School of Udhra (1993), Whatsaid Serif (2001), Splay
Anthem (2006), Nod House (2011), and Blue Fasa (2015), each con-
tain sections of one of his poetic series, “Song of the Andoumboulou”:
the first seven sections appear in the first book, the next eight in the
second, and Whatsaid Serif is entirely composed of sections 16–35 of
the series. 39 In Splay Anthem, Mackey merged “Song of the Andoum-
boulou” with another series, “mu.” Thus, each of the poems that com-
prise Splay Anthem is, in a sense, a part of both series. Approximately
every other poem is given the title, “Song of the Andoumboulou: XX,”
while (most of) the intervening poems have the subtitle, “—‘mu’ YYth
part—.” Thus, effectively, the odd-numbered “mu” poems are also the
even-numbered “Songs of the Andoumboulou” (which otherwise don’t
exist), and vice versa for the odd-numbered “Songs of the Andoum-
boulou.” This revision-through-merging of two of his poetic series is
an example of the way in which the poet attempts to access difference,
to keep his poetry “in process,” even after (in some cases, much after)
it has achieved what is most often thought of as a level of finality via
publication.
The “Song of the Andoumboulou” is a funereal song from the Dogon
cosmology; the “Andoumboulou” are an earlier, failed version of human
beings, a draft of humanity. Mackey has said that he “couldn’t help
thinking of the Andoumboulou as not simply a failed, or flawed, ear-
lier form of human being but a rough draft of human being, the work-
in-progress we continue to be”(“Preface,” Splay Anthem xi). Thus, the
“Song of the Andoumboulou” is a song of humanity, our song. The sec-
ond series of the “Song of the Andoumboulou,” in School of Udhra, is
introduced by a quotation from Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen’s
The Pale Fox:

First to be born were the Yeban, small creatures with big heads,
discolored bodies, and frail limbs who, for shame of their condi-
tion, hide in the holes of the earth. They coupled and gave birth to
the Andoumboulou, who are even smaller than they are. All these
beings were born single. All were incestuous because, like Ogo his
progenitor, a Yeban male coupled with his daughter, an Andoum-
boulou woman. Thus the earth’s interior became slowly populated
with these beings…40

The funereal song citing these human ancestors is sung as a remem-

brance and recollection of those gone, a call to rebirth and regeneration.
As figures of frailty and failure, they are used in a ritual of death and
mortality. At the same time, their song also marks the movement of the
192  Cryptic Versions
spirit of the deceased to another realm. The song of the ­A ndoumboulou
is simultaneously one of lament and rebirth, and through the ritual func-
tion of song forms a basis for individuals to come together. This is a
“blutopic” moment: utopian in that it brings individuals together, but
without the forgetting of the past that may be one of the hazards of a
utopia.
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 1” begins by addressing the song itself,
with the line, “The song says the dead will not ascend without song,”
thus reflecting the ritual importance of song (Eroding Witness 33). The
song confers on the singer the divine power to allow the dead to pass
from earth. At the same time, the song proclaims its own powers, and
not those of the singers who are merely vessels for the ritual of song.
Previous to the opening of the poem, there is a quotation from Françoise
di Dio’s liner notes to Les Dogon, a recording of Dogon music that first
interested Mackey in their culture. The note describes the ritual nature
of the song:

The song of the Andoumboulou is addressed to the spirits. For this

reason, the initiates, crouching in a circle, sing it in a whisper in
the deserted village, and only the howling of the dogs and the wind
disturb the silence of the night.
(Eroding Witness 31)

The force of music, in this quotation as well as this poetry, is a rit-

ual one. It is a conduit between life and death; it moves minds as
well as spirits. Music, and lyric in particular, retains past knowl-
edge through its place in ritual. This knowledge is in danger of
being lost to time. As “Song of the Andoumboulou: 1” continues,
the penalties for not observing the ritual of death properly are re-
cited; the failure of the dead to leave the earth means their names
“get/ our throats” (Eroding Witness 33). (The expected “stuck in”
is ­delayed until the next line, as “the/ word sticks” (Eroding Witness
33), a menacing threat to frustrate the forward movement of time
and history.) Unexpectedly, this knowledge is not passed on orally
or through practice, but through books. Like most parts of “Song
of the Andoumboulou,” several fields of action seem to take place
at once, structured by a transcendent lyric. The consciousness of the
speaker is present in multiple settings, and in the more contemporary
one, he interacts with a woman, whose words cut in throughout the
poem, distinguished by italic type. (This is another way in which
difference is marked, and is a form of juxtaposition.) She makes
demands on the speaker that are simultaneously physical, intellec-
tual, and musical: “Tutor / me, teach me this thirst,” or demand-
ing to have “my body sounded. / Drummed” (Eroding Witness 34).
 Cryptic Versions  193
The woman’s presence in the poem will remain mysterious until the
quotation on its first page, from Marcel Griaule’s Conversations with
Ogotemmêli, is considered:

“You speak of ‘making’ people believe. Was there then something

secret, which they were not supposed to know?”
“If you wanted to explain what happened to someone who
knew nothing about it, to an ordinary man, you would say that a
power came down from heaven to eat the old man and change his
bones into beneficent stones.”
“But what is the truth?”
“If one wanted to explain it to you, a Nazarene, one would
say that someone came down from heaven like a woman with a
woman’s dress and ornaments, and ate the old man, and that the
stones are not his bones but her ornaments.”
(Eroding Witness 1)

Though the French ethnologist attempts to discover the “truth,” the

African holy man insists that what truth one can know will be re-
vealed by myth, and is specific to the seeker who would know it. Here,
the coming of death, the passing on of life and knowledge, can only
be understood through the mythic figure of a devouring, demanding
woman, but one who, through her mythic nature, is desirable. This
is one of the first instantiations of a female figure who will haunt the
“Songs of the Andoumboulou”: she appears as “Anuncia/Nunca” (as
Mackey describes her, “promise and impossibility rolled into one”)
throughout Splay Anthem and as “Sophia,” the Gnostic goddess of
wisdom, in Whatsaid Serif (“Preface,” Splay Anthem x). This partic-
ular myth is how the speaker of the poem can learn the “truth,” such
as it is. Myth allows this poetry to be the conduit through which fully
disparate times, places, and cultures may have communication (and
communion).41 The speaker’s alignment in the midst of these multiple
cultures/ times/ religions is complex. He must remain separate from
the Dogon culture, for it is only as an outsider that he may see the
movement from life to death to a new life as the figure of a woman. He
is neither fully of nor fully separate from place, time, or culture, but
moves among and between them.
This movement and simultaneous separation and inclusion in cul-
tures, times, and places return us to the beginning: the whole and the
edge. The speaker’s experience is simultaneously central and marginal.
Cut off neither from ancient nor from contemporary knowledge, he yet
cannot know the “truth.” Myth comes to him though, from an ancient
time and place, to transmit knowledge to his contemporary self; it al-
lows him to access difference through the song of the Andoumboulou.
194  Cryptic Versions
In Mackey’s essay, “On Edge,” the following passage directly precedes
the one cited earlier:

With an idea of an edge I mean to offer a possible correction to a

too simple reading of Robert Duncan’s phrase “symposium of the
whole.” In the same chapter of The H.D. Book in which the phrase
is found Duncan writes: “Not only the experience of unity but the
experience of separation is mother of the man.”
(260)

Mackey’s citation of Duncan here is not merely fortuitous; his poetry

as well as his critical work has been deeply engaged with Duncan’s.42
They share a deep investment in myth, and a belief in its continuing
relevance for contemporary life. Both poets use myth as a kind of knowl-
edge about the past that is equal to that of history; both also use it as
a source of knowledge about the present. The question of myth as a
source of knowledge about the past and the present is also a question of
authority. The citation of a source of knowledge, whether myth, history,
or other, involves an invocation of authority, one that exists outside the
poem. Duncan and Mackey both have vexed relationships with West-
ern sources of authority; both are intellectual, scholarly poets whose
poetry involves many sources of knowledge derived from books.43 As I
discussed in Chapter 3, Duncan’s sources of learning are a mixture of
canonical and noncanonical Western texts. He was educated in Gnos-
ticism and the occult and valued these sources as equal to more tradi-
tional literary, philosophical, and religious ones. Mackey’s interest in
alternate traditions brought him to the African sources that he uses in
“Song of the Andoumboulou” but also to the mythologies, religions, and
literatures of Bedouin culture and those of the New World, specifically
Central and South America. For Mackey, as for Duncan, the inclusion
of noncanonical sources of knowledge is part of a larger political project
in which the subjugation of other forms of knowledge goes along with
the subjugation of other people. His efforts to get outside the Cartesian
separation of mind and body, to find a noninstrumental relationship
to knowledge and poetry, are developed particularly extensively in the
sections of “Song of the Andoumboulou” that opened this chapter, in
which the speaker trades letters with the Angel of Dust.
This insistence of the open-endedness of knowledge, the contingency
of truth, is also a part of Mackey’s interest in “othering” in transcen-
dent lyric. The first poem to demonstrate his notion of this practice, his
version of juxtapositional collage inspired by forms of improvisation
in jazz, is “Song of the Andoumboulou: 10.” In this poem, the speak-
er’s experience of death and remembrance through a sudden encounter
with a deceased friend’s poem then impels him to creative acts of his
own.
 Cryptic Versions  195
sat up reading drafts
of a dead friend’s poems, poems
kept in a book I hadn’t cracked
in years.
Rugs burnt Persian red repeated,
echoed, red ink like an omen of
blood.    Red ink as if to be
echoed at knife-point ominous
(School of Udhra 5)

This act of reading is also an act of remembrance for one gone, a “Song
of the Andoumboulou” for the friend who has passed, in that it is an act
of remembrance (one in which “the / word sticks”) but also one meant
to dispel spirits, who clearly leave ominous images if not the threats of
harm that the dead made in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 1.” In the
midst of this, images of desire are intermingled:

tongues
inadvertently touch…
burnt
[…]
legs ascending
some unlit stairway, saw myself
escorted thru a gate of
unrest. The bed my boat, her look
lowers me
down, I rise from sleep,
[…]
Taut legs. Long. Lengthening shadow. Deep
inside one stumbles. Rugs burnt. Burning.
No light.
(School of Udhra 5)

These lines offer a fine example of Mackey’s characterization of his poetry

as “transcendent lyric.” The speaker here is and is not speaking from his
own experience. Mackey has addressed poetry’s—and ­music’s—­ability
to access experiences outside the self in a variety of venues, perhaps best
in his essay on duende, “Cante Moro.” Here, he claims,

This wooing of another voice, an alternative voice, that is so im-

portant to duende has as one of its aspects or analogues in poetry
that state of entering the language in such a way that one is into an
area of implication, resonance, and connotation that is manifold,
­many-meaninged, polysemous. One has worked beyond oneself.
It is as if the language takes over. Something beyond the will, the
196  Cryptic Versions
conscious design or desire of the poet, is active, something that goes
beyond univocal, unequivocal control.
(186)44

This is an expression of one way that Mackey’s poetry uses techniques

adapted from music to access modes of difference in his poetry. Robert
Zamsky characterizes this proclivity of Mackey’s poetry as its “excess
of sound, structure, and organization, features that mark its difference
from the wash of everyday language” (119). In these lines from “Song
of the Andoumboulou: 10,” his access to this difference—to modes of
experience outside of his own personal experience—is mediated through
reading, in this case, the poetry of a dead friend. Rather than slipping into
a solipsistic bout of self-reflection (one typical outcome of a traditional
lyric poem), the speaker takes this opportunity to reach out to his dead
friend, and to others, through the communal gesture of song. As with the
original “Song of the Andoumboulou,” the ritual of remembrance after
death is mingled with experiences of life’s frailty as well as regeneration.

Baited lip. Love’s flawless

jaw. Said “I love you,” loaded
like
a pointed gun. Burnt rugs needed
only a spark, spoken, ember.
Spilled ink. Prophet’s red.   Struck
Dumb
(School of Udhra 5)

As with the earlier song, here the knowledge is experienced through a

female figure of desire, one that maintains a menacing as well as an entic-
ing presence. The speaker of this poem seems to exist entirely in the con-
temporary world, but his access to knowledge of other times and places is
aided by his reading practices. This knowledge is a risky one: through it,
the speaker learns but is also threatened with the failure of his own voice.
In the version “below the line,” the speaker is vulnerable as well, but
through likeness rather than difference:

Blinded
by what likeness I saw. Exotic Persian red
robe I put on this morning. Mad at the
world and at the mention of loss of a new convert
to light…

And at the mention of light a new convert

to what at whose coming on even breath
gave out…
 Cryptic Versions  197
Shook as though caught between warring
darkness, torn, blinded by what
likeness
I saw
(School of Udhra 6)

Here, the experience of alternate forms of knowledge has fully inhabited

the speaker: no longer aware of differences, he is stunned by ­likeness
and by the power of light and darkness. The light/dark imagery, and,
in particular, the references to conversion and blindness all refer back
to ­Mackey’s interest in Gnosticism. Gnosticism, as a “heretical” ver-
sion of early Christianity, reverses most of the common associations of
­Western metaphysics; thus, for instance, light is associated with blind-
ness rather than insight.45 This poem is an example of what has been
called ­Mackey’s difficulty. Like Hughes, his collage is cryptic; there is
no citation of sources, nor a reliance on the “lyric I” whereby the reader
can easily identify with the speaker and transform his experiences into
a digestible narrative. Unlike Hughes, he does not provide an alternate
­citation—such as musical accompaniment—nor does he work from
sources that any general audience, no matter how sophisticated, could be
expected to understand.

*****

Mackey’s move to combine his two poetic series, “mu” and “Song of the
Andoumboulou,” in Splay Anthem is a bold one, and one that invites
certain comparisons between the two series that have now become one.
It may be that this move to combine the two series causes readers now
to question, even to “revise,” past notions about each series as a separate
entity, making it another form of “othering.” As Norman Finkelstein
has claimed,

The two series offer a productive tension, a movement between sha-

manic dreamtime (altjeringa) and what Mackey calls historical “ren-
dition.”…. [T]he diasporic travels that regularly punctuate Song of
the Andoumboulou poems always lead us both toward and away
from the Atlantean/Utopian domain that is “Mu”…. The result is
a continuous, recursive, sideways movement as the two poems veer
between the extremes of catastrophic fall and ecstatic redemption,
traveling through landscapes and dream scapes variously shaded by
idealism and foreboding.
(193)

Both series invoke notions of travel, though in very different ways: “mu”
may refer, among other things, to a continent once thought to have
198  Cryptic Versions
existed in the Pacific, and thus, much like the notion of Atlantis, con-
tains notions of utopian longing for that which has been lost. As Mackey
says,

“Mu” carries a theme of utopic reverie, a theme of lost ground and

elegiac allure recalling the Atlantis-like continent Mu, thought by
some during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth cen-
tury to have existed long ago in the Pacific… Any longingly imag-
ined, mourned or remembered place, time, state, or condition can
be called “Mu.”
(“Preface,” Splay Anthem x)

One aspect of the original “Song of the Andoumboulou” (of the Dogon)
is a naming of places to which the deceased has traveled, where he had
placed his feet. The ritualized act of naming that is a part of the “Song
of the Andoumboulou” is transformed, though the poems, into one of
the ways in which Mackey’s version of “transcendent lyric” allows for
notions of difference within the printed page. As this series has devel-
oped, its “tribe” of wanderers seem literally to be traveling (to the extent
that anything in these poems can be taken literally) in various methods
of conveyance—train, raft, or bus—though they, or sometimes just the
speaker, also seem to travel between and among times as well as space.
Travel is a perennial topic of poetry (especially “lyric” poetry) but as
Mackey has said,

Glamorizations by the tourist industry notwithstanding, travel and

migration for the vast majority of people have been and continue to
be unhappy if not catastrophic occurrences brought on by unhappy
if not catastrophic events: the Middle Passage, the Spanish Expul-
sion, the Irish Potato Famine, conscripted military service, inden-
tured labor systems, pursuit of asylum.
(“Preface,” Splay Anthem x)

His travelers are never tourists. Their movement provides an occasion

for transcendence. Often, they are seekers, wanderers toward that uto-
pian “no-place,” who move together (“we” and not “I”), looking for this
no-place, but carrying with them the memories of the past.46 This is the
“blutopic” aspect of Mackey’s poetry.
Splay Anthem’s third section, “Fray,” begins with two poems, “Sound
and Semblance—“mu” twenty-sixth part—” and “Song of the Andoum-
boulou: 48,” which dove-tail with each other to show the ways in which
these two series, both about music and difference, can become one while
yet remaining separate. These two poems start by invoking a very spe-
cific place, each a desert location that the “we” of the poem exists in
currently, and yet their similarity seems to end there. In “Sound and
 Cryptic Versions  199
Semblance,” “A sand-anointed wind spoke of/ survival, wood scratched
raw,/ scoured bough…” This wind becomes the primary source of both
musicality and discourse as the “we” of the poem lies under a tree “filled
up with wind and more/ wind…”

It was the bending of the boughs we’d

read about, Ibn ‘Arabi’s reft
ipseity, soon-come condolence,
thetic
sough…
(Splay Anthem 55)

The wind and the tree combine (“bending of the boughs”) to produce
knowledge-endowing sounds (“thetic sough”) of Sufic mystism, but ones
that also produce a kind of dissonance as to where the “we” of the poem
is currently located. (“It was Egypt or Tennessee/ we/ were in. No one,
eyes exed out,/ could say which.”) The destruction of vision takes an
almost cartoonish tone here (“eyes exed out”) and is nearly passed over,
unremarked, compared to the importance of sound—and particularly
the natural sounds of the environment—that have been catalogued in
the preceding lines. In the last line of the section, the “we” arrives (per-
haps nowhere, or perhaps just somewhere unknown) and this arrival
is proclaimed by the wind: “Fleet, millenarian/ we it now was whose
arrival the wind/ an-/ nounced.” (Splay Anthem 55).
In the second half of the poem, the band of wanderers is found (not-
found), still blind and unnamed (“eyes crossed/ out, X’s what were left,
nameless/ what we saw we not-saw”)—this might recall the section from
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 10” where the speaker is blinded by like-
ness and knowledge—left to glean knowledge from a snaking metaphor
that combines the natural world with books:

….We lay on our backs looking

up at the limbs of the tree we lay
underneath, leaves our pneumatic
book,
We lay on our backs’ unceased reprise.
(Splay Anthem 56)

The “pneumatic book” here may be one that is on topics of the spirit, or
it may be one that is related to the wind—which had, earlier in the poem,
been the primary bringer of knowledge. In either case, the book’s pun-
ning “leaves” (the leaves of the tree, or the “leaves” of a literal book) are
mirrored by a book whose title may be We lay on our backs. As in the
first half of the poem, the connection between knowledge and the natu-
ral world—particularly the wind—is made. The gathering of wanderers
200  Cryptic Versions
comes to a head, using ritual (“wrote/ our names out seven times in
dove’s/ blood”) to give themselves not only names but titles: “Duke was
there, Pres, Lady,/ Count, Pharoah came later” (Splay Anthem 56). All
of these names or nicknames belong to famous jazz musicians: Duke
­Ellington, Prez/President Lester Young, Lady Ella Fitzgerald, Count
Basie, and Pharoah Sanders. Thus, the group of blind wanderers does be-
come, literally, “crowned in sound.” As the poem closes, the wanderers
are transformed again, this time into muni birds, whose calls form the
basis of the musically derived culture of the Kaluli people of Papua New
Guinea. The muni bird is one of the images that Mackey has returned
to in his writing almost obsessively, and it is easy to see why, when this
particular manifestation of images is unpacked. To be transformed into
a muni bird is to recall (or “reprise”) the foundational myth of the Kaluli
people, “The Boy who was Transformed into a Muni Bird,” in which a
young boy, unable to persuade his sister to share food with him through
language, is transformed into a muni bird and reaches her through song
instead. The gisalo songs of the Kaluli—a type of ceremonial song—
have a scalar pattern that is a transcription of the muni’s calls, signifying
that their songs are a metaphorical combination of the birds’ song pat-
terns and “talk” patterns. The Kaluli’s notions of gisalo musical struc-
ture encompass both song’s melodic elements (“bird sounds” or “obe
gono”) and its textual elements (“bird sound words” or “obe gono to”).
These concepts can be further extended to notions of singing (“molan”
or “one sings”—the vocalization of text and melody or melody alone)
and composing (sa-molan or “one sings inside”). Melodic invention is
perceived to come from nature (“outside and around”) while textual in-
vention from the intellect (“inside and down”). Having the wanderers’—
now muni birds’—heads “crowned/ in/ sound only in/ sound” as the
poem closes consolidates the poem’s chain of images linking the natural
world with intellect through the force of music. The wanderers’ access to
“difference” is achieved through music: their identities, never fully stable
(they are both nameless and placeless), are momentarily consolidated
through their dualistic titles, but then, almost instantly, transformed
into that of animals, albeit a musical, almost magical, animal.47

*****

“Song of the Andoumboulou: 48” begins with a much more specific

location than “Sound and Semblance” did: “It was a freeway overpass
we/ were on, an overpass east of/ La Brea” (Splay Anthem 57). La Brea
is, most famously, the name given to the tar pits which inhabit a section
of land in the middle of Los Angeles’s “Museum Row,” where hot tar
has seeped to the surface of a subterranean oil well for thousands of
years, and subsequently trapped countless animals in a type of “natural”
history museum. The “we” of the poem (again, the plural first person
 Cryptic Versions  201
pronoun is used almost exclusively) is standing on a freeway overpass
as streams of cars pass below, “desert/ flutes gargling wind at/ [our]
backs” (Splay Anthem 57). The winds of the southern California des-
ert are here transformed into a wind instrument, as the poem’s speaker
observes, “What there/ was wasn’t music but music was/ there” (Splay
Anthem 57). The natural sounds of the environment—the winds, and, in
this instance, the sounds of cars on the freeway—create the music that
“was there.” The traffic that is observed by the “we” of the poem from
above is given a deathly cast: it is “elegiac,” a “river of souls,” a “river
of light,” and a “river of lies.” Each car bears “the/ world away, each
a fleeting guest/ whose going we lamented, kin we/ could’ve sworn we
saw” (Splay Anthem 58).
In the second half of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 48,” the reader
reencounters both the sounds and images connecting music/wind/trees
from “Sound and Semblance.” This section of the poem (and several
following) proceeds primarily through repetition of key phrases and, of
course, very heavy repetition of sounds. Both the sounds of the words
and the images evoked by these words push toward an understanding of
music that strives to perceive music (in the traditional sense), “noise,”
and the human voice all as equally important vehicles for a type of tran-
scendent knowledge. Thus, the first stanza begins:

Head of echoic welter. Head I was

hit upside. Curlicue accosting my
neck, ears bitten by flutes, fluted
wind…
(Splay Anthem 58)

with the evocation of sound through both noise (“echoic welter”) and
music (“ears bitten by flutes”), both resolving in the “fluted wind.” The
second stanza repeats the phrase “Head I was hit upside” and continues
the evocation of the wind with sound, this time with a human voice:
“Curlicue wind/ filled with rasp and chatter, all/ unquiet…” (Splay An-
them 58). This wind which has now brought noise, music, and a speak-
ing voice is, as in “Sound and Semblance,” the bringer of knowledge,
though this time of an unhappy sort. The wanderers, standing on a
freeway overpass and watching the traffic pass, become witness to the
coming and simultaneous going of Anuncia, “her name now/ Nunca,/
borne away inside each one…” Anuncia, one of the female figures of
knowledge, desire, and longing who haunts Mackey’s poetry, has been
transformed into “Nunca,” nothing, as she is carried away in the traffic
of the “river of light/lies.”
Nunca’s departure into the “river of lies” anticipates the metamor-
phosis of the imagery and sounds of light/dark, knowledge/lies that has
been established earlier in the text into a series which privileges sound
202  Cryptic Versions
over vision as the pathway to knowledge and transcendence. When the
reader next encounters the repetition of the phrase “Head I was hit up-
side,” it has merged into the tree imagery carried over from “Sound and
Semblance”:

Branch I stood
held up on… Ledge, putative loquat
limb, east of La Brea… Branch I
was
hung up on…  The bending of the boughs
was a blending of eyelessness and/ light…
(Splay Anthem 58)

The tree, which was literally a “tree of knowledge” in “Sound and Sem-
blance,” here is both a “loquat” tree and the tree formed by the “branches”
of the highway, a branch the speaker is “hung up on” (hung up on, as in
obsessed with/ “hung upon”). The “bending of the boughs” brings the
combination of “eyelessness” and “light” which has been associated with
blindness as well as likeness or similitude both in “Sound and Semblance”
and in “Songs of the Andoumboulou: 10.” Western metaphysics would
traditionally associate vision and light with knowledge, but the Gnostic
tradition that Mackey has been influenced by reverses that association,
through the belief that true knowledge is hidden (and thus associated
with darkness). It is through this divergence from the chain of associ-
ations whereby light = vision = knowledge that Mackey can effectively
substitute sound (and most importantly, music) for light. Being eyeless
(and thus blind) becomes the pathway to greater knowledge, a type of
transcendent knowledge one can achieve only through sound and music.
“Song of the Andoumboulou: 48” contains three versions that are
“below the line” after the first. Each of these develops the themes and
imagery from the first version, but also those from earlier “Songs of the
Andoumboulou.” In particular, the phrase “rugs/ burnt/ Persian red”
is a line from “Song of the Andoumboulou: 10,” in which the speaker
reads poems written by a dead friend, where the phrase may be the title
of the book (as in They lay on their backs), it may be a phrase from a
poem, or it may be something else altogether. In both poems, the image
evokes other images of blood and death. In “Song of the Andoumbou-
lou: 48,” we have a “Wife dead, daughter’s father’s hand/ bloody, not to
be called husband…”(Splay Anthem 60). In later versions, this murder is
linked to Mackey’s earlier book, School of Udhra, which takes its title
from the Bedouin poetic tradition associated with the seventh-century
Arabic poet Djamil. The descriptor of these poets, “who when loving
die” becomes a line in “Song of the Andoumboulou: 48,” taking on
a very different meaning with the story of the murderous husband. In
another—much less utopian—example of the ideas of “difference” and
 Cryptic Versions  203
“othering,” we have the repeated phrase, “Who when loving die” fol-
lowed by the qualifier, “… came back amended or/ were killed, not-to-
be-called-husband’s/ hands/ in cuffs” (Splay Anthem 62). Though the
husband’s (“not-to-be-called-husband”) arrest offers a rare moment of
narrative closure to this version of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 48,”
the final version of “Song of the Andoumboulou: 48” begins with a de-
nial of that closure and of the type of teleology that most narrative relies
upon: “Udhrite arrest echoed Udhrite/ embrace but nothing stopped”
(Splay Anthem 63). This poem, set above a Los Angeles freeway, also
ends with the phrase, “nothing stopped,” which functions as a literal
evocation of traffic patterns, a depressing reminder of domestic violence,
but simultaneously a—perhaps the only—utopian moment in the poem.
As Mackey states in the preface to Splay Anthem,

Kaluli poetics posits poetry and music as quintessentially elegiac but

also restorative, not only lamenting violated connection but aiming
to reestablish connection, as if the entropy that gives rise to them is
never to be given the last word. As with the Dogon trumpet blast or
the post-burial parade in New Orleans music, something undaunted
wants to move no matter how inauspicious the prospects, advance
no matter how pained or ungainly
(xvi)

The connection between poetry and music that Mackey posits here, de-
rived from the Kaluli, is one that Finkelstein has described as problem-
atic, calling the

[o]rphic vision of unity into question, reminding us of the gap be-

tween word and being, or in structuralist terms, between sign and
referent. The orphic experience is actually the orphaned experience;
unity is separation, or to use one of the poet’s favorite terms, it is a
discrepant engagement…. The “bedouin” quality of Mackey’s po-
etry is thus orphic and orphaned, connoting spiritual loss but also
spiritual seeking….
(196)

Like Mackey’s own notions of the “whole” and the “edge” that I began
with, these ideas of the “orphic” and the “orphaned” get at the mirrored,
push-and-pull aspects of the “utopian” and the “dystopian”—together
making up the “blutopian”—that characterizes Mackey’s transcendent
lyric. It is this type of acceptance of (and not a reconciliation of) oppo-
sites that is at the basis of his use of juxtaposition as a form of collage.
Mackey’s use of music to access difference—modes of experience and
being outside the self—is one that can be seen as utopian, and yet it is
one that contains within it the understanding that such motions toward
204  Cryptic Versions
the collective—away from the “I” and toward the “we”—will not al-
ways (or even often) be without their swerving toward catastrophe (for
instance, the story of the “not-to-be-called-husband” at the end of “Song
of the Andoumboulou: 48”). Merging with others can be a merging with
the worst parts of the world we live in, an understanding of that world
as a fallen place. Mackey’s idea of the “blutopic” combines the results of
his “transcendent lyric” in a way that does not deny its utopian longings,
nor its sometimes dystopian outcomes.
What I’ve been discussing as the “transcendent lyric,” with its pursuit
of “another voice,” moves directly against what has become standard
practice for a substantial segment of contemporary poets: the confessing
of personal experiences, during the course of which the speaker of the
poem is assumed to be identical with the poet. This poetry developed
out of a liberatory impulse connected to the feminist movement and the
sexual revolution but also to the peace movement during the Vietnam
War; forty years later, it has become aligned with notions of cultural
pluralism. The nonacademic readers who do read and buy books of con-
temporary poetry have shown a strong draw to this type of poetry, often
termed “minority” or “identity-driven.” This literature has appealed to
what seems to be an insatiable appetite for the transmission of extreme
experience held by American readers. Mackey’s poetry incorporates
source material that ranges across cultural, geographic, and temporal
divides, and the perceived (and largely realized) “difficulty” and “intel-
lectualism” of the poetry risks alienating a reader searching for a one-to-
one correspondence between sentiment and author, as well as a type of
narrative closure rarely found in collage poetry. Though it is undoubtedly
true that Mackey’s poetry is difficult and intellectual, it is also true that
an increased sensitivity to the importance of musical forms and the dom-
inance of sound throughout the poetry could bridge the gap between the
work and an audience in search of sound rather than pure content.
As well, Mackey’s poetry returns to the utopian impulse originally
embedded in the ideal of a collage poetics. At the birth of collage, those
who used it in a pedagogical way believed that it would not be esoteric
but exoteric: that the use of unknown source materials would not con-
fuse readers but rather spur them on to greater learning of their own.
Mackey’s use of source material that is unknown even to many of those
among the best-read potential readers is similarly utopian. His is a proj-
ect toward a greater unity in the fields of knowledge—Western and
non-Western, intellectual and spiritual, academic and experiential—
without the smoothing over that can be part of the effect of unification
or utopianism. To go back to the terms with which I opened this section,
this is collage as the “whole” and as the “edge,” one that wants to teach
without losing its ancient power of ritual, passed down through song.

*****
 Cryptic Versions  205
The question of reception that closes my discussion of Mackey is equally
relevant to the Hughes’s poetry. Hughes spent most of his career going
to considerable lengths to cultivate an audience for his writing in
­general—he was, after all, a working writer, trying to make a living from
his art—but especially for his poetry, which was the work into which he
poured his most extensive efforts. Even his blues poetry, which has been
lauded by many of his best critics, was, in some sense, an attempt to gain
a wider audience, particularly among the “folk” or “common people”
that he loved. Hughes believed that by encapsulating their autochtho-
nous musical forms in poetry, he could both celebrate those forms and
draw in readers uncomfortable with poetry that was literary in the tra-
ditional sense. As his style changed over the years of his poetic career,
Hughes continued to write poetry that he felt worthy of his highest am-
bitions (such as Montage and Ask Your Mama), and he wanted a wide
audience for this body of work as well, though it often didn’t receive one.
His move to a cryptic collage style in Ask Your Mama is a move away
from his ambitions for a mass audience; his inclusion of the musical
score is a signal of the specific audience he had in mind when he wrote
the poem. This step is meant to mediate—for the possibly esoteric text—
between the demands of his art and the demands of an audience. In this
sense, Hughes too is concerned with the problems of the “whole” and
the “edge,” the terms that make collage possible in a meaningful sense.
These black American collage poets represent just two possibilities
of what I propose as an alternate genealogy of American artists who
have used collage as a platform for their deepest concerns regarding the
social and political lives of their communities and of the nation. Rather
than following what has been the dominant tradition in American late
­t wentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry—the lyric in the mode of con-
fessional poetry—they have sought out other, nonpersonal places from
which to speak, those that derive their power from music. The inspira-
tion of music is both ancient and modern: ancient in that it represents
poetry’s most ancient communal function, as a part of the collective
rituals of memory and history; modern in that the specific forms of mu-
sic directly inspirational to these poets are forms of improvisatory jazz,
which share many of the formal and ethical impulses of collage. The
analysis in this chapter, and, in fact, throughout this book, is intended as
the beginnings of a corrective to the hegemonic and counterproductive
notion that poetry—particularly experimental poetry—is elitist and so-
lipsistic by nature and has no relevance outside its own sheltered world.

Notes
1 This term appears in his interview with Edward Foster.
2 I make a distinction here between individuals who may receive continual
enjoyment from reading canonical poems that they are likely first to have
206  Cryptic Versions
learned in high school or college, and the coteries of readers and buyers of
the books of contemporary poets where the initial interest is based around
a form of identification derived from a personal characteristic (like gender,
race, sexual orientation, or national origin).
3 The “Song of the Andoumboulou,” for the Dogon, is a funereal song sung
to our human ancestors, figures of frailty and failure, reminders of human
mortality but also the possibility for change and renewal.
4 These terms are cited in his essay, “Other: from Noun to Verb.” See my dis-
cussion later in this chapter.
5 These are the same developments in music that Hughes was responding to in
Ask Your Mama.
6 During the 1970s, there was a point at which poetry (and other arts as well)
based from identity-driven claims did function effectively as both a means of
social or political critique and as a form of community building, within the
feminist, the gay liberation, and the Black Arts Movements (and likely oth-
ers as well). I argue, not that this form has never had political efficacy, but
rather that, at this historical moment, the personal, as a speaking position,
no longer functions as an effective stance of political critique.
7 By “cryptic” I mean the more common, “[h]idden, secret, occult, mysti-
cal,” but also the obscure, “[a] secret or occult method (of communicating
knowledge).” Most intriguing for my argument is perhaps the zoological
definition of the word: “Of markings, coloration, etc.: serving for conceal-
ment; protective.” This definition takes on a particular relevance as part of
my argument is contingent on the notion that Hughes is trying to keep the
comprehension of his poetry hidden from some readers. From the Oxford
English Dictionary.
8 Until the second decade of the 2000s, there had been surprisingly little
scholarship on the poem. R. Baxter Miller may point toward an explanation
for this lack when he remarks that Ask Your Mama, “call[s] into question
the boundaries between poetry and music, as well as those between litera-
ture and politics” (86). Hughes’s integration of poetry, music, and politics is
revolutionary, and that innovation seems to have stymied critical attention
to the work. Larry Scanlon’s article, “News from Heaven: Vernacular Time
in Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama,” analyzes the poem’s use of the ver-
nacular, and, in particular, the dozens, as a way of coping with loss or fail-
ure. Though it touches on Ask Your Mama only briefly, James Smethurst’s
article, “Don’t Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat: Langston Hughes, the Left,
and the Black Arts Movement,” usefully complicates the commonplace no-
tion of Hughes’s political quietude in the post-1953 era. John Lowney’s arti-
cle, “Jazz, Black Transnationalism, and the Political Aesthetics of Langston
Hughes’s Ask Your Mama,” brings out the aspects of Ask Your Mama’s
transnationalism that had been hitherto ignored in the critical literature.
Meta DuEwa Jones, in The Muse is Music (2011), usefully summarizes the
principle behind the previous rejection of this ambitious text:

Tellingly, the most dismissive evaluations focus on Hughes’s aesthetic

departure from racial authenticity, linguistic verisimilitude, and folk sim-
plicity; they seem to desire to corral Hughes’s aesthetic sensibilities into
a mode of racialized accessibility and folk primitivism that limit com-
prehending his jazz epic’s sophistication. In other words, Hughes’s book
hallmarks the diasporic and multilingual nature of racial performativity
while providing a complex, polyvocal, and global revision of jazz-text
collaboration.
(60)
 Cryptic Versions  207
9 The first of these shifts was newly evident in Ask Your Mama; evidence of
the second and third can be seen in Montage, though they only reached their
full expression in Hughes’s last book.
10 This claim is found in notes in the poet’s archive in the Yale Collection of
American Literature housed at Yale University’s Beinecke Library (MSS 53).
11 This recounting of these events is derived from Rampersad (314–6), as well
as Saul. The general outline of the riot and its aftermath is recounted in
many jazz histories as a significant event. Hughes apparently took the can-
cellation of the Festival, and the events that preceded it, very personally.
12 Citations are taken from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ask
Your Mama is reproduced there in facsimile form.
13 These styles would include gospel, folk, calypso, German lieder, African
drums, Dixieland, and “traditional,” that is, white, American standards.
The musical directions as published in the text (almost certainly not for use
by musicians) are much more detailed than the musical notes that Hughes
wrote for use by musicians in live performances of Ask Your Mama (MSS
56). Hard bop is a form of jazz that grew out of bebop and its improvisatory
forms, but integrated gospel, blues, R & B, soul, and other forms of “roots”
music. It was less intellectual, and more populist, than bebop.
14 See MSS 676–8 for examples of the documentary phrases that Hughes im-
ported into sections of Montage.
15 Previously, Hughes’s practice had been to use an individual speaker (but one
that is often clearly distinct from him as the author—i.e. a woman, or a work-
ing class man) for his blues poems; his political poetry, on the other hand,
was written from the first person perspective: the lyric “I” without the lyric.
16 Anita Patterson argues that Hughes was already wary of casual jazz listeners
when he composed Montage:
Hughes in ‘Dream Boogie’ suggests that too many people who listened
to jazz did not hear the seriousness of its emotional message and were
not aware of the violent historical conditions out of which the impulse to
formal innovation emerged.
(682)
The poem “Dream Boogie,” with its use of unglossed scat syllables, does
partake in the same impulse toward cypticism from which Ask Your Mama
emerges.
17 Likewise, Robert Hokanson argues, in his article, “Jazzing it Up: the Be-bop
modernism of Langston Hughes,” that, “Instead of an omnipotent, ­Whitmanian
‘I’ or shorer of fragments like Eliot’s speaker, Montage [of a Dream Deferred]
presents the poet's voice(s) as a pervasive but not a commanding presence in a
chorus of diverse voices” (76). One of the important differences in the poetic
voice that we see between Montage and Ask Your Mama has to do with the
transition between the “chorus” of distinct, individual voices, and the presence
of one voice, but one without individual characteristics.
18 Citations of the poetic text appear as line numbers, inclusive of each section
of the text. Citations of the prose material that appears alongside the poetic
text appear as page numbers.
19 In the musical milieu, an example of this would be the use of a sudden and
unexpected key change in order to drive off stage an interloper who was
sitting in with a band.
20 The text originally did not have footnotes, which were only added by editors
Rampersad and Rossel with the release of The Collected Poems in 1994.
21 Those “in the know” would be the urban black community, highly literate in
contemporary music, not exactly a small group. But given American racism
208  Cryptic Versions
and still prevalent segregation, whether by law, custom, or economics, there
were (and are) geographic areas where black and white populations live in
separate societies, with a separate base of common knowledge.
22 A guira is a percussive instrument of Latin American origin made from a
serrated gourd and played by rhythmically scraping it with a stick.
23 These names refer to Leontyne Price, Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte,
Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, and Pearl
Bailey (Collected Poems 682).
24 Hughes may have had personal reasons for commenting on this “representative-
ness” of black celebrities in the public eye as it was something he himself had to
struggle with throughout his career, as the so-called “black poet laureate.”
2 5 Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) was the leader of the independence
movement in Ghana, and became the country’s president in 1960. He
attended Hughes’s alma mater, Lincoln University. Gamal Abdel Nasser
­(1918–1970) led the army revolt that deposed the monarchy in Egypt
in 1952. He governed Egypt until his death. Benjamin Azikiwe became
the first president of an independent Nigeria in 1960. He also attended
­L incoln University. Fidel Castro had been in power for two years when
Ask Your Mama was published. Ahmed Sékou Touré, a union official
in the early 1950s, served as the president of Guinea from 1958 to 1984
(Collected Poems 681–2).
26 For this version, see MSS 62. However, earlier versions of the song—going
back to the 1920s—did have lyrics that emphasized the sexual nature of the
request that is being made by the song. Hughes here transforms this meta-
phor from a sexual one to a political one. Cf. the discussion in Steven Tracy’s
Langston Hughes and the Blues and Jones, The Muse is Music.
27 Hughes claimed to Carl van Vechten that this was the first use of the dozens
in poetry. Though his poetry is derived from folk art, Hughes was by no
means an expert in street mores; his use of the dozens is based at least in
part on scholarly research. He cites the seminal article by Dollard, as well as
Elton (MSS 53).
28 Dr. Rufus Clement (1900–1967) was the president of Atlanta University
from 1937 to 1967. In 1957, he became the first black American since Re-
construction to serve on a school board in a Southern state. Zelma George
Watson (1903–1994), a musician and an educator, served in 1960 as an alter-
nate in the U.S. delegation to the U.N. General Assembly. She once stood and
applauded a motion for ending colonial rule in Africa even though the U.S.
abstained from a vote on the measure. Orval Faubus (1910–1979) was the
Democratic governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967. In 1955, he summoned
the Arkansas National Guard to stop the integration of Central High School
in Little Rock, a move that prompted President Eisenhower to send in the
U.S. Army. James O. Eastland (1904–1986) was a Democratic senator from
Mississippi and an ardent segregationist. John M. Patterson was a Demo-
cratic governor of Alabama from 1959 to 1963. (Collected Poems 682).
29 This section, which may be the most provocative and controversial in the
poem, was not added until after the first performance of Ask Your Mama on
January 31, 1961 (MSS 53).
30 With regard to the Civil Rights Movement, it seems relevant to note here
that this vision is only a reversal of racial segregation in the South, and not a
removal of it. Though Hughes’s militant stance is well ahead of the political
curve (anticipating the Black Power Movement by several years), and fairly
courageous given the scrutiny he was under, the reference in the musical text
to the Civil Rights Movement seems to be a counter to the tendency to read
this passage literally—that, and his prefacing it with the phrase “DREAMS
AND NIGHTMARES.”
 Cryptic Versions  209
31 As Hughes had spent periods of his career doing political work—­particularly
during his leftist period in the 1930s—this consideration seems to be a re-
consideration of his own life choices.
32 Hughes was called before the committee in 1953 and his testimony was
broadcast over the radio on March 26th of that year.
33 Many scholars, including both of Hughes’s biographers (Rampersad and
Berry) have, to a greater or lesser extent, taken Hughes to task for not stand-
ing up to McCarthy and company. David Chinitz, in Which Sin to Bear
(2013), has done extensive archival research in the declassified materials per-
taining to McCarthy’s investigations; Chinitz’s exemplary scholarly work
puts Hughes’s televised performance in an entirely new light, as it clari-
fies the degree to which Hughes’s responses had been, essentially, the re-
sult of a series of negotiations, completed both during private meetings with
­McCarthy and during an “Executive Session” of the committee which was
not televised or accessible to the public. Cohn’s efforts to assign Hughes a
narrative role in these proceedings (“reformed ex-Communist”), one which
had benefits for both parties, was something that Hughes at first attempted
artfully to avoid but then, reluctantly and after ensuring that he would not
be required to “name names,” accepted. This is precisely the type of teleo-
logically determined narrativity that his late poetry refuses.
34 The term “blutopic” is derived from the title of a brief instrumental Duke
Ellington composition, “Blutopia,” found on The Duke Ellington Carnegie
Hall Concerts: December 1944. According to Graham Locke, it is “mu-
sically unexceptional…” However, Locke continues, “I read ‘Blutopia’ as
utopia tinged with the blues, an African American visionary future stained
with memories” (3). This formulation is very similar to my interpretation
of Mackey’s use of the term: the “blutopic” is a version of the utopian that
refuses to forget the lessons of the past.
35 This “angel of dust” series eventually develops into Mackey’s serial fiction
work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Thus, an
argument could be made for these pieces as fiction.
36 In an interview in The Chicago Review, Mackey recalls that
it was sent to a friend but it wasn’t addressing the friend as Angel of Dust.
I wrote the Angel of Dust and I sent a copy to the friend. I was allowing
the friend to overhear this conversation with the Angel of Dust, which
was prompted by questions raised by this friend who had written me
about a poem. Anyway, it started there. One of the impulses was because
it came out of questions about my poetry raised in correspondence with
this friend—one of the impulses was to unpack the poetry in some ways
but not to do it in verse. To unpack, not to explain.
(“Interview with Peter O’Leary” 298)
37 Please see my analysis of this essay in Chapter 1. This description of Fenol-
losa’s essay is from a letter (dated August 24, 1916) by Pound to Iris Barry.
38 About performance-based poetics, Mackey has said that,
Performance is a bothersome word for writerly poets. Performance art,
poetry slams, and the like have made the term synonymous with theat-
ricality, a recourse to dramatic, declamatory, and other tactics aimed at
propping up words or at helping them out—words regarded, either way,
as needing help, support, embellishment, deficient or decrepit or even
dead left on their own. Writerly poets… shy away from the implied sub-
scription to such a view of language, resistant to the presumed deadness
of the word, the apparent deadness to the word by those who advance it.
(“Sight Specific” 228; emphasis in original)
210  Cryptic Versions
39 Nod House continues in much the same vein as Splay Anthem, with the two
previous series now merged as one as does Blue Fasa, which contains “Songs
of the Andoumboulou” 88–110. Prior to Eroding Witness, Mackey had pub-
lished two chapbooks, all the poems of which are collected there.
40 The ethnographic works of Marcel Griaule and his associates are central to
these texts.
41 Myth, like utopianism, can also have the unappealing capacity to smooth
differences over, and to naturalize sites of inequality that are anything but
natural. Mackey’s retention of the concept of the “edge” works against these
forces.
42 Mackey wrote his doctoral thesis largely on Duncan and visited him in San
Francisco prior to Duncan’s death.
43 As opposed to, say, personal experience, dreams, the imagination, or gossip.
This is not to say that either of them doesn’t use these sources of knowledge,
but rather that both very self-consciously use book-based learning in their
poems.
4 4 Duende is a term borrowed from the poet Federico García Lorca meaning,
according to Mackey,
‘spirit,’ a kind of gremlin, a gremlin-like, troubling spirit. One of the
things that marks the arrival of duende in flamenco singing is the sound
of trouble in the voice. The voice becomes troubled. Its eloquence is the
eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic, self-problematizing
eloquence.
(182)
45 As Peter O’Leary describes it,
…there are two myths that characterize the many divergent trends of
Gnosticism: the myth of a female trickster, the goddess Sophia (Wisdom)
who produces a catastrophe at the moment of creation (birth), which in
turn causes the production of the visible world; and the myth of a male
trickster, the miscarried son of Sophia who produces the world from “ig-
nominous” water or from the fallen and scattered dreams of the remote,
true God. Gnosticism reverses two of the most central principles of the
Bible and of Platonic thought—that of an “ecosystemic intelligence” (the
idea of a benign creator God) and that of an “anthropic principle,” or
the notion that the cosmos was made by that God to be inhabited by
humans.
(20–1)
46 Regarding his use of the first person plural pronoun, Mackey has said that,
One student [at one of his readings] said something that particularly
stayed with me, which is that he read the “we” as an invitation, that he
felt invited as a reader to join that “we,” identify with it. I realized not
only that that was what I wanted, but that that was what the “we” im-
pulse, going all the way back, had been for me as well, as first reader of
my own work—an invitation.
(Heuving 215)
47 This information has been gathered from Steven Feld’s book, Sound and
Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression as well
as from the article “The Musical Manifestations of Animal and/or Bird Sym-
bolism in Suya, Kaluli, Mbuti, and Temiar Rainforest Socieites,” by ­A ndrián
Pertout.
Conclusion

The organizational principle of this book has been loosely chronologi-

cal; I have proceeded from collage’s earliest theorists and moved essen-
tially forward in time toward the present. This final, concluding chapter
will consider the work of four writers working in the “post-collage”
moments of the 1990s and early 2000s; two of these writers (Bruce
Andrews and Kenneth Goldsmith) use apparently standard syntax and
work within received forms; two of them (Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky and
Susan Howe) work within an explicitly “cut-and-paste” aesthetic. The
conclusion of this book will juxtapose the work of these four authors to
consider why, in our postmillennial, post-collage moment, some writers
continue to use collage as a formal strategy; as well, I will consider the
ways in which the legacy of collage remains powerful even for those
writers working outside of an explicitly “cut-and-paste” aesthetic.
Bruce Andrews has been a member of the experimental group that
most directly preceded the conceptual writers, the language poets, or
“language centered” writers. They are known for combing formal ex-
perimentation in language with a clearly expressed interest in progres-
sive politics; Marjorie Perloff has described their project as one that
produces “the resistance of the individual poem to the larger cultural
field of capitalist commodification where language has become merely
instrumental” (Unoriginal Genius 9). Andrews describes this work as
one whose motivation has been figured as “a desire to explore language,
as up close as possible, as a material & social medium for restagings of
meaning & power” (Paradise & Method vii). In order to open up this
analysis of how later writers have continued to work to transform liter-
ary and artistic forms through the use of juxtapositional techniques, I
will turn to Andrews’s 1992 collection, I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut
Up (or, Social Romanticism). Andrews has discussed his writing process
in a variety of locations, and it seems to have remained fairly stable;
yet, the works he has produced through this process are quite varied
in format.1 I Don’t Have Any Paper contains 100 sections of varying
lengths, organized by title alphabetically. The title of each section is the
initial phrase (occasionally the entire first sentence) of the given poem.
The titles read alone are often funny and/or jarring: “Animal Dicks in
212  Conclusion
Bed”; “Cerebellum Replaced with Joy Stick”; “Everything You Don’t
Know is Wrong”; “Penis is Hegemonic”; “Stalin’s Genius.” Yet, these
titles function in the context of the individual sections of I Don’t Have
Any Paper to remove or reverse the assumption of meaning contained
within the title phrase. For instance, “Penis is Hegemonic” would, for
readers familiar with academic discourse, seem to have a fairly straight-
forward meaning. The first lines of the section with that title, though,
read: “Penis is hegemonic incubus nurse; decathlon lassitude = boss can
be deposed but the soot still sticks, market mechanisms were still rea-
sonably effective” (211). I’m not going to attempt to do a traditional
close reading of these lines though I know that virtuoso versions of such
an analysis can and have been performed. The point, I think, is not to at-
tempt to wrest—and freeze—meaning from such language but rather to
examine how Andrews uses familiar (some standard, some not) forms of
discourse to do two things: (1) expose the way that we are surrounded,
always, by commodified forms of language, and how the crafters of these
forms of language attempt to limit the meaning of words, phrases, and
forms of language for their own benefit; (2) let loose language’s “play”
for individual readers, both in terms of its formal qualities and its ability
to inspire (or dissuade) forms of identification. This is one of the primary
ways that formally innovative writing like this can be political in the
absence of content that is on manifestly political topics.
How Andrews’s writing finds its place within the trajectory of col-
lagist juxtaposition is clarified by a description of his writing process.
­A ndrews described his process to fellow language writer Charles Bern-
stein in an interview conducted for LINEBreak (1995):

By that point [the mid-1980s] I had pretty much adopted the

method that I’ve been working with since, which is to generate large
amounts of material on very small pieces of paper—one two, three,
four, five words at a time in clusters, short fragments of phrases or
­prephrases—and then compose the work sometimes much later, af-
ter I had written the raw material into works based on a whole series
of other decisions I’d make later. It’s more like editing film footage;
the editing process becomes the composing process.
(npn)

In the same interview, Andrews, in response to Bernstein’s comment re-

garding the wide range of reference common in his poetry, responds,

[W]hat we think of as poetry or literary writing is supposed to accept

the fact that it can operate happily with such a shrunken range of
reference. Meanwhile, everybody in the world is confronted with this
increasingly exploding range of reference that they embody in their
own personal lives. I mean, if you are walking down the street…
 Conclusion  213
mass-culture, television, whatever your range of information is:
you’re being bombarded with this stuff all the time. And to somehow
think that poetry is a place where you can’t, unlike all these other
areas in your personal life, have this come to life, seems so sad.
(npn)

His descriptions here mark out both a formal method—writing down

words and phrases generated from and inspired by material encountered
in daily life, then later working this material into texts—and a pool from
which his content (language) is drawn—the information-laden world of
daily life in the metropolis. Reading I Don’t Have Any Paper with this
methodology in mind, it seems clear that what Andrews is generating
can be described in terms of a free-floating transcription of snippets of
language material overheard and overread as one is moving around a
large urban area at the end of the twentieth century, or as a combination
of “voices” from individuals, from corporate consumer culture, and of-
ten a mix of the two as these types of discourse tend to merge into one
another. Andrews’s use of “found” material (perhaps “heard” would be
a better descriptor) and his modular composition style both make this
work an appropriate hinge between what one might think of as more
traditional collage works of the era of the 1960s and before and that of
conceptual writing and to clarify how his writing broaches the political
even while having little manifestly political content. 2
The term “disgust,” used by critic Sianne Ngai with respect to A­ ndrews’s
work, helps to elucidate how his work broaches politics in everyday life.
“Disgust” has a bodily connotation of the abject that is sometimes an
aspect of Andrews’s work, but is not I think the primary force behind it.
Revulsion might be more precise; yet, Ngai’s analysis is insightful in that
she claims that I Don’t Have Any Paper–which she truncates as Shut
Up—attempts to “disclose the limits of the ‘social disattendability’ that
enables friendly as well as disdainful tolerance for an object perceived as
so unthreatening in its inferiority as to be barely perceptible at all” (Ugly
Feelings 349). This observation about I Don’t Have Any Paper gets at the
massiveness of the text—not only in terms of literal size (at nearly 300
pages, it is quite long) but also in terms of the density of language one
must negotiate in order to read it, language that appears in “densely com-
pacted block[s]” (McHale 165) rather than paragraphs, and generates a
“fluctuating, abusive, textuality” (Bettridge 108). The text consciously
and insistently preys upon the reader’s good will in the way that spam
email does: one unwanted email is liable to be deleted without notice; an
entire inbox full of spam, however, can make one feel violated.
This violation of good will is pursued by the text through a probing
of the identificatory processes that are a part of the most basic structure
of all narratively driven works of art. That is to say, as a reader (viewer,
etc.), one identifies to a greater or lesser extent with the main “character”
214  Conclusion
or primary consciousness through which the content of the work is ex-
pressed. While these associations tend to be attenuated through various
experiments with form and content, the attempt at identification, par-
ticularly when the first person pronoun is used, often remains. I agree
with Julianna Spahr that, “[t]he identities proposed by these works are
ones that reject theories of identification based on sameness,” though I
think one might push this insight even farther in that Andrews’s work
seems to question identification under any circumstances (72). He has
termed such identification a moment of closure, even a “forced trans-
lation” (“Reading Notes” 205), and identification’s forcefulness can be
seen when even very savvy critics ask questions of his work such as,
“Are these statements those of the author?”3 Ngai’s insight regarding I
Don’t Have Any Paper makes clear how Andrews’s citation, reiteration,
and reworking of found language from his social environment stretch
these identificatory processes to their limits; for many readers—who are
likely more comfortable with what Spahr terms the “the New American
poetry’s inclusive pluralism” (84)—it may push them beyond what is
tolerable. For instance, consider these brief sections of Andrews’s text:

I welcome your copulation, jam the live lobster down the bathing suit.
(21)
clowns make good flagellants, the happy molecule of the multina-
tional corporation at home with two circus murder suspects: proba-
bly diaspora coupons—mastodons coming to dinner. I used the Hiss
typewriter to annotate—that’s fine products—the Rosenberg’s jello
box protest.
(112)
One of those hostesses missed a beat, that’s where the people get
fucked at, you dig, adenoid by collision, 21 children die every minute.
(186)
My roots, no thanks. Are we ready for surgery yet? Habit is the great
leveler; theory poops the suburbs—.
(187)
Experiences are know what we bad culture means nothing more
mama more money, more wrist slaps, is manufactured in the body
in insufficient quantities—drugs accept tips; fuck the group, this is
communism.
(248)
Workers become another herbicide; it’s difficult to eat people when
you have an inferiority complex—use them as scumbags for a newly
extraverted curiosity.
(249)
 Conclusion  215
Reading these sections from I Don’t Have Any Paper makes clear that
this is not merely the case of an author attempting to craft the most re-
pellent series of statements that he could. One can easily imagine more
revolting sentiments than those given here, or more generally throughout
I Don’t Have Any Paper. However, this would likely require the use of
language that approximates standard English more closely, as well as a
more straightforward sense of narrative or at least syntactic meaning.
This type of reading, rather, requires one to make a series of failed,
stuttering attempts at creating a kind of sense out of these phrases and
sentences—attempts that when they result in any type of sense most
often produce a sentiment that one then wishes to reject or step away
from rather than embrace.4 The typical identificatory process a reader
engages in may work in reverse; rather than identifying with a character
or a series of sentiments in a positive sense, one may equally negatively
identify with it, producing a stronger sense of one’s own self via a neg-
ative definition: “I am who I am because I am not that.” This is its own
type of compensatory gesture, but it is one that Andrews’s work denies
the reader. His modular version of found language inspired collage po-
etics works to force the reader constantly to ask, “Who is this producing
this language?” When this question cannot be readily answered (for it is
no one person, machine, or entity), the reader is then forced to consider
if some part of the language contained within the text could have ema-
nated from the self, no matter how ugly, awkward, or bizarre it may be.
This version of the typical identificatory process allows or perhaps even
forces the reader to confront the least attractive parts of the polis in a
capitalistic democracy, and, putatively, to accept that these are a part of
the body politic if not one’s own body.
The clearest sense that can usually be made from the language of I
Don’t Have Any Paper is the recognition of bits and phrases derived
from the language of mass media, advertising, and corporate culture,
forms of language that increasingly surround us, and which are increas-
ingly imbricated with each other. Phrases like “… is manufactured by
the body in insufficient quantities” evoke the language of pharmaceuti-
cal advertising, while “it’s difficult to eat people when you have an infe-
riority complex” that of self-help culture and daytime talk shows. The
“work” that has been done to these phrases evidences both how much
this type of language has infiltrated all types of discourse (personal and
otherwise) and also how such language is available for manipulation:
this works both ways. As reader (or author), one is free to do what one
wishes with language, copyright notwithstanding; as Mark Leahy de-
scribes it, “[t]he reader can perform the text, take the language and can
rehearse a multiplicity of roles” (239). Yet, this freedom is also extended
to those who craft the seductively catchy phrases of advertising and its
sister discourses (such as the pharmaceutical warning labels cited ear-
lier). The juxtapositional force of Andrews’s work is to create a jarring
216  Conclusion
recognition not just of something like “diversity” within the metropolis
but of how that sense of difference (and the liberatory possibilities that
could lie dormant within it) is readily being smoothed over and infil-
trated by the manipulators of such discourses, those who instigate what
Jerome McGann terms the “forms of ruin” that dominate the landscape
of Andrews’s writing (66).

*****

I have argued in this book for a broad conceptualization of collage as

encompassing forms of juxtaposition. Viewed as such, the conceptual
writers, the group who have followed most closely upon the language
writers, take the presumptions of collage to their most logical and ex-
treme conclusions, as staked out by David Antin in the quotation with
which I began, where he describes, “as limiting cases [for collage] the
unconditional presentation of a single thing or the presentation of the
same thing over and over and over and over again” (214). Goldsmith has
claimed, as a way of distancing his own project from that of language
writing, that, “Language Poetry has fulfilled the trajectory of modernist
writing and as such, has succeed[ed] in pulverizing syntax and mean-
ing into a handful of dust. At this point in time, to grind the sand any
finer would be futile” (“After Language Poetry” npn), and it does seem
evident that the project of the explosion of the atoms of language has
been taken very nearly as far as possible. Yet, if one views both language
poetry and conceptual writing within the context of collage, their con-
nection, as points on the same trajectory (one I’m not sure is subsumable
to modernism), emerges. The project of Goldsmith and other conceptual
writers working in a similar vein, while practically opposed to the work
of language poets, is, in terms of its guiding philosophy, quite similar. 5
In the wake of the publication of Day, in which he appropriated an en-
tire issue of the New York Times, Goldsmith gave a talk entitled “Being
Boring,” which has become a sort of ars poetica for at least a part of his
artistic practice. In this text, he claims,

In 1969, the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world

is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any
more.” I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be
retooled as, “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do
not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new
condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of
available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; in-
stead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. I’ve
transformed from a writer into an information manager, adept at
the skills of replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, hoarding,
storing, reprinting, bootlegging, plundering, and transferring. I’ve
 Conclusion  217
needed to acquire a whole new skill set: I’ve become a master typist,
an exacting cut-and-paster, and an OCR demon. There’s nothing I
love more than transcription; I find few things more satisfying than
collation.
(“Being Boring” npn)

Goldsmith’s claim of being a “word processor” and moving information

from one (expected or “normal”) location or context to a new (unex-
pected) one are clearly acts of juxtaposition: this goes beyond the issue
of “re-framing” derived from conceptual art (though his debts to not
only the conceptual art tradition of the 1960s but the Duchampian one
of the 1910s and 1920s are obvious and well-documented). While liter-
ary collage began using juxtapositional techniques at the level of gram-
mar and syntax (and, through documentary collage, content as well),
conceptual writing has moved these techniques from the micro- to the
meta-textual level.
I will expand on this claim through a cursory review of the relevant
analytic features of Goldsmith’s Day: the text as a physical object is
now bound as a book, printed on white paper as opposed to newsprint.
It is clearly intended to be a semipermanent object, to the extent that
any book is, rather than one that is disposable, such as an issue of a
print-based newspaper is. It is a large book, 835 pages, and, even in
paperback format, quite heavy, weighing nearly six pounds. (Robert
Sheppard notes that Day “feels like a weighty masterpiece” (136).) Its
dimensions are larger than the trim size of a standard monograph at
10.5 inches by 7 inches. All of these ways of measuring the material
qualities of a text act in extreme contrast to the size, shape, texture, and
weight (both physical and metaphorical) of a daily print-based news-
paper. On the page, the sections of Day’s text derived from copy are
aligned with standard margins instead of newspaper-style columns; yet,
content remains as it was originally printed. The result is that copy
is printed in discrete paragraphs, interspersed with—and interrupted
by—the text from advertisements that are lineated in choppy phrases,
presumably as they appeared in the original, but without illustrations or
photographs. All of these are aspects of a typical newspaper as text that
are strange when compared with a typical book as text and yet which
are passed over as “normative” within the expected context of reading
a newspaper. Though English speakers are trained to read from the top
left to the bottom right of a page, for instance, virtually all would know
not to do so when reading a newspaper. If one wants to follow a given
story off the front page of a given section of the newspaper, one must
pause one’s attention and turn to a later page in the section in order to
resume continuous reading. Goldsmith’s act of “word processing” un-
dermines the habits that allow us to be effective and efficient readers of
various types of texts, feats accomplished in daily life through various
218  Conclusion
acts of supposition and visual editing. That is to say, readers of print
newspapers ignore the strangeness and uniqueness of how a newspaper
is formatted as it is a prosaic object seen by a regular reader on a daily
basis. No other texts we encounter regularly require us to read in pre-
cisely this way.6 The differences marked here manifest in material terms
a transformation that is entirely conceptual yet exemplifies like no other
experiment the force of Ezra Pound’s definition that literature is “news
that STAYS news” (more on this to come) without necessarily being
“language charged with meaning,” at least not in the conventional sense
(ABC of Reading 29, 28).
The juxtapositional impact of Day’s content is ultimately integral to
the context of its form. However, Goldsmith’s decision to “retyp[e] the
page… in full before proceeding to the next one” is a type of creative
decision, even as it eschews the status of authorship or composition
(“Being Boring” npn). The nature of this constraint limits not only the
way in which Goldsmith produced Day but continues to limit the way
in which his readers may approach Day. While a newspaper reader has
the unlikely option to read each page of a newspaper in the manner
Goldsmith replicates in Day (that is, to read the opening paragraphs of
each article on a given page before proceeding on to the next one), or to
read a newspaper in the traditional modular way (to read each article in
full on its own, necessitating skipping among pages to finish any given
article), or even merely to read headlines, to move profligately among
sections of the paper, or any of almost innumerable reading options,
Goldsmith’s choice of constraints for the appropriation of the material
that makes up Day closes off, or at least complicates, some of those op-
tions for readers (though it also opens up other options as well). There is
no longer an efficient way to read an entire article of this particular issue
of the Times in full within Day, given that the page numbers faithfully
transcribed from the original issue of the Times no longer correspond
directly to any single page where the end of a given article might fall
within the text of Day.7 Thus, the particular constraint that Goldsmith
has chosen for the manner in which he would appropriate his chosen
text functions not only as a given choice among an array of many pos-
sible options for how he would reproduce the Times but also to pull
into very precise relief the resulting effect of this choice for the reader.
As Perloff has commented regarding the work of both Goldsmith and
John Cage, “a citational or appropriative text, however unoriginal its
actual words and phrases, is always the product of choice—and hence
of individual taste” (Unoriginal Genius 169). Regarding his technique
in producing Day, Goldsmith claims,

I allowed myself no creative liberties with the text. The object of

the project was to be as uncreative in the process as possible. It was
one of the hardest constraints a writer can muster, particularly on
 Conclusion  219
a project of this scale; with every keystroke came the temptation to
“fudge,” “cut-and-paste,” and “skew” the mundane language. But
to do so would be to foil my exercise.
(“Being Boring” npn)

The language of the “exercise” used here fits well with his notions of
“uncreativity” and the title of the essay, “Being Boring”; it also chal-
lenges the notion of the published book as the writer’s end product, and
more so, that of the literary artwork as monument to the ages. Day
is, clearly, “a radical instance of information management” (McCaffery
191) and “an austerely impersonal act of appropriation that is only tan-
gentially about preserving ephemera” (as opposed to projects like Solil-
oquy or Fidgit) but rather is about “remediation, the transposition of
information from one medium to another” (Reed, Nobody’s Business
74). Regardless of whether he did or did not “fudge” any of the language
printed in the Times, the manner in which he produced the text and the
manner in which he discussed his production of this text work to create
a very pointed contrast between a typical understanding of what would
constitute “literariness” and what can be considered “news.”8
The term “news” is the plural of “new”; it thus marks out a domain
of the inherently topical and extraordinarily time sensitive. There is no
“old” news; that which does not transition into “history” is relegated to
the insignificant. There are three relevant phrases regarding the intersec-
tion of what in everyday conversation is commonly termed “news” and
literature. There is the famous slogan of the New York Times, “All the
News that’s Fit to Print,” which is the first line of Day. Then, there is the
adage that Goldsmith has cited in discussion of the text: “nothing’s more
boring than yesterday’s news.” Finally, there is Pound’s definition of liter-
ature that it is “news that stays news.” The notion of “all the news that’s
fit to print” most obviously conjures the idea that there is some news that
is not fit to print, and this is an idea completely belied by the most basic
constraint that serves as the umbrella term for G ­ oldsmith’s project. He,
unlike the Times, is not serving as editor or censor for the content within
but merely “passing it along.” This phrase which of necessity must be the
first line of Day puts the lie to its own claim to truthfulness within Day.
It must also recall the counter-motto from Rolling Stone magazine: “All
the News that Fits,” one which might have made a much more apropos
statement of Goldsmith’s intentions with Day, although Day’s weighti-
ness as a material object again strains the notion of such limitations of
size when measuring and recording a day.9 Rolling Stone’s slogan carries
Vietnam War era countercultural claims that are anti-censorship and
egalitarian, i.e. you decide what news you should read. We are only lim-
ited by financial and/or pragmatic realities of how many pages of copy
we can bring out in any given issue. Though Day, like Rolling Stone,
claims to present “news” without censorship, the necessary belatedness
220  Conclusion
of Day’s presentation again brings into question the term itself (“news”)
and its function within the culture we currently live.
The idea of “yesterday’s news” that Goldsmith has used to describe
Day is in one respect no more than an accurate representation of its
content. It is, literally and paradoxically, old news, lacking the virtue of
a categorical apotheosis into a grand narrative of “history.” (September
1, 2000 is not September 11, 2001.10) As Craig Dworkin terms it, Day
ironically “fixes and monumentalizes the transient in the frozen mo-
ment of sculpture…” (“Zero Kerning” 18). Yet, the idea that it is there-
fore “boring,” Goldsmith’s watchword for his own métier, is of course
a matter of perspective. The notion that “news” received belatedly must
necessarily be boring presupposes that the reader is already acquainted
with the relevant facts contained in that given bit of information. Which
is to say that what is interesting, and therefore relevant, in the news is
contingent on the “new.” In the years since Day’s publication—and this
was largely true even at that moment, though it has become more so
since—the relevance of the print newspaper in delivering actual “news”
(that is, the most recent, up to date, version of significant facts about
world affairs) has dropped precipitously. Anyone with a smartphone can
choose to receive such information at literally any time, taking the no-
tion of the “24 hour news cycle” created by CNN and other cable news
networks, beginning with CNN’s June 1980 launch, to its necessary
and logical conclusion. What place, then, does the daily print newspaper
hold as a delivery system for relevant, time-sensitive information? Not
as the primary vehicle for the delivery of relevant facts about world af-
fairs, surely. Thus, the content of Day, even read a decade or more past
its publication, cannot be relegated to the “yesterday’s news” idea of the
boring. If it is boring, it’s not boring because the facts contained within
its covers are out of date. Reading an old newspaper or a magazine that
is hopelessly out of date because one is stuck in a waiting room is the
kind of “boring boring” that Goldsmith describes in “Being Boring”
as the “forced state” (paying bills or standing in line at the post office).
The boringness of Day is much more likely to fall into the “unboring
boring”-ness that he relates to the work of Cage and minimalist music.
Day’s impressive heft, size, and length give it the potential for “unboring
boring”-ness merely by the sheer number of hours it would take to turn
835 pages (let alone actually “read” it), and yet who reads the newspaper
from cover to cover? Most people, as Goldsmith remarks, spend some-
thing like twenty minutes with the newspaper over breakfast, a fact that
makes the act of sitting down with Day a type of performative act in
and of itself.
Thus, we might consider Pound’s claim that “Literature is news that
STAYS news.” The question then to ask about Day would be twofold:
does its “news” stay “new(s)”? And is it literature?11 Day’s act of juxta-
position, of collage at a meta-textual level, I would argue, estranges the
 Conclusion  221
“news” contained within it in a way that allows it to stay “new(s).” Both
the “new” from “news” and from literary experimentation lose their
status through familiarity; yet, inevitably, the vast majority of the news
items reported were of necessity passed over with no more than a glance
by the majority of readers of the Times in its original instantiation. Thus,
even if one had read the original issue of the Times from ­September 1,
2000, much of Day could still read as “new,” if not “news.” Though
gleaning the content at the level of “news” is not the point of reading
Day for most readers (I imagine) that is not the same thing as saying
that there’s no point to reading it, despite Goldsmith’s proclamations
that, “You really don’t need to read my books to get the idea of what
they’re like; you just need to know the general concept” (“Being Bor-
ing” npn). Reading Day is an exercise in redirected attention. Just as
one cannot read Pound’s “Malatesta Cantos” without an awareness of
the poems’ documentary and citational nature, one cannot read a text
like Day without an awareness of the secondariness and belatedness of
its content. Though a good deal of the initial batch of literary-critical
commentary on the content of Day related to its status as reportage of
the pre-9/11 world for a post-9/11 world and the inevitable wistful senti-
mentality wrapped up therein, this is not precisely what I mean.12 In the
same section of ABC of Reading in which Pound makes his proclamation
about literature staying “news,” he also states, “It is very difficult to read
the same detective story twice. Or let us say, only a very good ‘tec’ will
stand re-reading, after a very long interval, and because one has paid so
little attention to it that one has almost completely forgotten it” (29–30).
The lack of care with which newspapers are typically read—regardless
of their content—is made manifest by their material construction. (Or
perhaps it’s the other way around?) Day’s status as the secondary re-
construction of an (at this writing, more than fifteen years) old issue of
the Times invites attention to its content in a way that is diametrically
opposed to the way in which one “reads” the news, whether that be on
paper, in digital form, or as live media. I would contend that for a given
(interested) reader, Day is read either not at all—making it a conceptual
art object, or something like a Fluxus event score—or with careful at-
tention to both its form and content—which makes it literature.
Day’s meta-textual juxtapositional techniques work by contrasting
the daily print newspaper with the book (presumably, the poetry book as
art object); this is the aspect of the text that Brian Reed terms “remedi-
ation.” This act transforms the ephemeral to the (relatively) permanent,
in terms of its materials. This is also true in its content: the “news” is
ephemeral in that it is constantly changing, with “new”-er news always
present to usurp the place of whatever current update exists. This stands
in distinction to the traditional notion of artwork as monument. Writers
who view their work as “in process” tend to have to work very hard to
get away from the received notion of publication as writing’s teleological
222  Conclusion
endpoint.13 At the same time, by bringing together the print newspaper
and the book, Goldsmith has combined what are essentially two dy-
ing media, to create an amalgamation of the two. This action estranges
both media while simultaneously raising the question of reading habits
in non-dying media such as web pages, social media, and text messages.
The reading habits foregrounded by Day’s form (how one must move
back and forth in the newspaper if one wishes to preserve “narrative”
continuity in a given story) approximate much reading online, clicking
on page after page of content, a technique that maximizes the number
of advertisements an individual will encounter on any given site. One
might also think about Day in the context of recent commercial ventures
offering to print consumers’ Facebook timelines in book form. Sites like
Facebook have evolved into a type of digital photo album/scrapbook
for many users, presumably moving beyond the material limitations of
the book as a physical object. In terms of the narrative of technological
progress, an online record of one’s memories “ought” to be “better”
than a photo album or scrapbook as a physical object. Yet, there seems
to be a sense among marketing departments (at one point, there were
three different companies offering this service) that individuals still de-
sire the physical object of the book as a record of their daily lives, events,
and memories, and that digital images and text cannot fully take the
place of something that can be held and touched.14 Day’s juxtapositional
techniques, considered within the formal history of collage, allow for a
full consideration of the ramifications of the transformation, over the
last century, of not only the artwork as physical object, as text, and as
conceptual nexus but also of the ways that all of those intersect with the
force of technology on the greater world.

*****

This chapter began with a consideration of two texts having no overt

relationship to a “cut-and-paste” aesthetic, the most widely recognized
marker of collage. I will continue with the analysis of two texts whose
creators have made their overt debt to the legacy of collage explicit.
Howe’s 1990 volume Singularities does so in a way that seems willfully
archaic, while Miller’s 2004 live film and audio performance, Rebirth of
a Nation, uses advanced visual and audio technologies to perform its cuts
and sutures on the source text in question. Though roughly contempora-
neous with Andrews’s I Don’t Have Any Paper (1992) and G ­ oldsmith’s
Day (2003), respectively, both of these texts maintain collage’s typical
refusal of standard syntax (textual or filmic) and are explicitly engaged
in a project whereby a collage text is used to transform the standard
narrative of American history. Rebirth of a Nation and Singularities use
juxtaposition in a way that is intently anti-narrative, and they both do
so in order to change the viewer/reader’s perception, to allow them to
 Conclusion  223
“see” things anew: this is the political power that collage’s original in-
novators had imagined it to have as well. At our contemporary moment,
a century past the first use of collage in the arts, and looking at the texts
that ended collage’s first century, it seems appropriate to revisit some of
the initial questions and challenges raised through the use of collage by
its original innovators.
The first of these is the dilemma of reception, or the question of
how collage’s combination of art and life can avoid allowing aesthetic
beauty, or intellectual difficulty, to evacuate, mute, or overwhelm social
or political critique. Or, to put it in another way (as I did in previous
chapters), if an artist wants to make a political critique, why not just
use standard rhetorical prose, and thus avoid being misunderstood? The
second, to which I will return, is that of authority, which entails textual
signification, as well as the contextual power of naming. Both textual
signification—the way meaning inheres in words—and the significance
of names (of people, places, or groups) rely upon forms of authority for
their power. The questions raised by the texts I consider in this section
are, how is that authority is constructed? And (how) can it be shifted
or changed?
Miller has alternately described Rebirth of a Nation as a “version,”
a “re-mix,” and a “deconstruction” of D. W. Griffith’s groundbreak-
ing 1915 film, Birth of a Nation. The wide variation in these terms is
meaningful: while a “version” (as in a “cover version”) can be admiring,
respectful, playful, or revisionist, and a remix usually indicates an in-
tensification of the changes of the cover version, a “deconstruction” is
almost always hostile, or at least skeptical, toward the source text. (The
resonance of “destruction” in “deconstruction” is often louder than that
of “construction” which is of course there as well.) This seeming ambiv-
alence in Miller’s intention concerning the source text is not surprising,
given its history. In the century since its release, Birth of a Nation—
the first film to be shown in the White House, by Woodrow Wilson in
1915—has become as well known for its aggressive racism as for its
remarkable technical achievement. Neither aspect can be denied. Where,
then, does this leave the critic, the scholar, or the historian of film who
does not wish to be identified with the views of the Ku Klux Klan?15
That is to say, how does one fit Birth of a Nation into a history of film,
without ignoring either its technical achievement or its moral and intel-
lectual failure? Perhaps a more urgent question, the one that animates
Miller’s work, would be how does one grapple with the ugliness of the
beliefs it espouses, and even fight against them, when those beliefs are
presented in images of haunting aesthetic beauty? Part of the challenge
of a text like Birth of a Nation is not just the impasse of its racist content
on the one hand, and its technical achievement on the other, but how
these two aspects of the film support and sustain each other. Miller has
made it clear—both in statements he has made about the film, as well
224  Conclusion
as in the DVD commentary—that it is precisely this aspect of Birth of
a Nation, the way that its form is integral to its (ugly) content, that
brought him to the project that would become Rebirth of a Nation.
This is one of the fundamental questions asked by collage as well: in
what way(s) can an artist use form—in this case, the formal strategies of
­collage—to perform a political critique?
Rebirth of a Nation employs many of the collage strategies delineated
in the course of this book as it attempts not to erase but to own up to and
exorcise Griffith’s impact on American society in the twentieth century
and beyond. These techniques include, primarily, juxtaposition, but also
repetition, musical citation, and revision (what I termed collage as “ver-
sioning” or “othering” in Chapter 5). Rebirth, much like Hughes’s Ask
Your Mama, mixes its visual and musical texts onstage. The visual and
the musical texts speak to each other, and about each other, sometimes
in a one-to-one relation (where the image on screen would seem to repre-
sent the origin of the sounds that are heard) but more often, not. Rebirth
uses the same basic strategy of collage film as both Rose Hobart and
Marilyn Times Five do (reediting a previously existing film), and, as with
Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart, there is frequently a studied disconnect
between what one sees and what one hears. The musical score, consist-
ing largely of contemporary electronica, hardly fits what appear to be
the Reconstruction era images on the screen, except in that Miller regu-
larly times the movement of his images to coincide with the beat of the
music. This lack of visual resonance emphasizes a strangeness in these
images that is not entirely apparent when one is ensconced in the nar-
rative, creating an “anachronistic dissonance” (Peterson 112) between
Griffith’s imagery and Miller’s music. This dissonance is one that was
designed as a part of a larger strategy of substitution, one that replaces
the film’s iconic score, “one of the original film’s greatest ideological
assets,” with “a dialogically reimagined aural experience for his audi-
ence” (Peterson 111). The strangeness present here is doubly reinforced,
for instance, by the bizarre apparition of the image of a group of slaves
“dancing” to the rhythm of Miller’s electronic score, in a twenty-first
century nod to classical animation’s “mickey mousing.” These moments
of strangeness serve to “break down the causal, progressive vision of
history to which narrative continuity lends itself” (Apple 50); this is one
of the ways in which Miller’s juxtapositional collage technique performs
a political function.
Each live performance of Rebirth is unique, as the work is mixed from
a store of visual and aural images during each performance.16 Segments
from Griffith’s film appear on three screens on stage, with the center,
larger screen serving as the repository for the main images from the film
(one can follow much of the plot of the original by watching this screen),
while the smaller side screens show film images that are more radically
remixed, as well as other material, including clips from performances by
 Conclusion  225
the Bill T. Jones dance company and images of Robert Johnson, whose
“Phonograph Blues” makes several appearances on the score. The con-
trast between the images on the central and the side screens helps to
illuminate “the ease with which mass media can substitute a constructed
narrative world for the real” (Perkins 24), a point which seems even
more pressing at the historical moment of this writing (2017).17 As well,
the prominent use of African American artists within Rebirth—both the
contemporary artists on stage (musicians) and on screen, as well as those
featured in the historical images and sound, like Johnson—is one way
that Rebirth suggests that “another future, another America, is possi-
ble” (Stewart 353), and thus that it may be viewed as utopian.
In contrast, the images from Birth of a Nation featured on the central
screen, which allow even those viewers who have not seen the original
film to grasp its basic plot, remain fully legible for what they were and
are: their inherent racism, mythic proportions, and aesthetic beauty all
persist. Indeed, Miller’s graphic additions to these images—he super-
imposes constantly evolving patterns of lines, curves, and numbers that
insistently recall blueprints or technical schematics, while individual
characters are given geometric signs that accompany them on screen—
work to enhance this beauty, not to disrupt it.18 I raise this point now,
but I will return to it below. The questions of the film’s racism and of
the mythic quality that inheres in its narrative are related. They depend
upon each other for their peculiar power: the myth of Birth of a Nation
has allowed its racism to persist, despite the caricatured quality of the
performances of the black-faced white actors.19 Miller describes Birth of
a Nation’s mythic quality as enabling

a fiction of African American culture in tune with the fabrication of

“whiteness” that undergirded American thought throughout most
of the last several centuries: it floats out in the world of cinema as
an enduring—albeit totally racist—epic tale of an America that, in
essence, never existed.
(“Rebirth of a Nation” npn)

The categorical function of “blackness,” then, is to be that which is set

in opposition to “whiteness.” This allows the category of whiteness to
obtain solidity, to remain functional. Without this binary opposition,
whiteness threatens to float away—to become evanescent. The possibil-
ity of the loss of these stable boundaries, and the fear thusly provoked,
is what Miller makes manifest in his film with his graphic additions.
This stability—or at least the desire for it—symbolized by these rep-
resentations of mechanical order is belied by the threatened chaos of
the Reconstruction era South that Griffith imagines. As Jesse Stewart
claims, “Miller’s use of gridlines, blueprints, and circuitry serve as visual
metaphors for the ways in which the film’s portrayals of racial and social
226  Conclusion
hierarchies have been woven into the circuitry of the mediated American
political landscape” (352). Thus, the characters that Griffith’s film por-
trays as the most dangerous to public safety and morality—who are, in
fact, the film’s “villains”—are the “mulattos.” They embody the secret
danger of those who fit into neither category but instead represent bodily
the erosion of such categories, whether through desire or violence. As
with Rose Hobart, one of the powerful political moves that a collage
filmmaker can make is to harness the nature of the film medium (the
cut, what Sergei Eisenstein referred to as montage) in order to juxtapose
precisely those things society might wish to keep apart.
Through repetition, changes in speed (slowing down, speeding up),
mirroring (where one side of the image is doubled across the screen),
and graphic additions, Rebirth first isolates and then interrogates the
moments in the film in which, once its narrative has been disrupted, the
binary opposition Birth of a Nation creates out of race becomes visible.
For example, Miller uses the “mirroring” technique in two parallel in-
stances: one takes place during a slave auction, the other at a meeting of
a legislative body. The similarities in gesture become immediately appar-
ent as one central figure speaks before a large group, gesturing grandly
in order to command the attention of the audience. In each case, both
the speaker and the audience are white, while the referent of the speech
and captive object of contemplation is black. In these scenes, the mir-
roring effect risks erasing the image’s political impact. Miller manifests
this risk consciously, once erasing the speaker entirely. The legislator is
absorbed by the “black hole” that is the center of the mirrored image, so
that only his hand is visible, doubled across the center of the image. In
another, the doubled image is itself redoubled and manipulated so that
it becomes abstract and iconic. These moments are brief, though. The
nature of the image within Rebirth is labile; its constant movement per-
mits momentary incursions into the realm of the abstract. Moments of
abstract beauty thus generate a greater contrast to the narrative ugliness
that persists.
This narrative ugliness seems most concentrated around, as men-
tioned previously, those characters who fit least easily into the binary
opposition around race Griffith’s film sets up: the intertitles refer to these
characters’ status as “mulattos” almost obsessively. This term functions,
in essence, as their “name,” despite the fact that few names are cited
in the piece, and that it has no spoken dialogue. Names seen on screen
include the name of the director of Birth of a Nation (Griffith) and that
of the author of Birth of a Nation’s source text, The Clansman (Thomas
F. Dixon); as well, in some of the intertitles that appear on the screen,
Miller has replaced Griffith’s name and initials, which typically appear
in script as a part of the graphic border, with his own. When considered
as a performative act that constitutes not only personal but also group
identity, the philosophical question of naming—what can be described
 Conclusion  227
as the “descriptivist” versus “anti-descriptivist” debate—contains deep
significance for Miller’s project in Rebirth. While the “descriptivist” po-
sition in this debate is perhaps the more obvious one, where each word
is the bearer of a specific meaning that refers to a specific object, Saul
Kripke describes how the anti-descriptivist position, in contrast, is con-
stituted by the idea “that a word is connected to an object or a set of
objects by a ‘primal baptism’, and this link maintains itself even if the
cluster of descriptive features which initially determined the features of
the word changes completely….” (89–90). At the core of the dispute is
the way in which descriptivists emphasize the immanent, internal, “in-
tentional contents” of a word, while what anti-descriptivists regard as
decisive is “the external causal link, the way a word has been transmit-
ted from subject to subject in a chain of tradition” (90). Kripke goes
on to describe the basic problem of anti-descriptivism as being how to
determine

what constitutes the identity of the designated object beyond the

ever-changing cluster of descriptive features—what makes an object
identical-to-itself even if all its properties have changed…. What is
overlooked… is that this guaranteeing the identity of an object in all
counterfactual situations… is the retroactive effect of naming itself:
it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the
object.
(94–5)

The idea that it is naming itself that constitutes the object, retroactively,
points to the nature of the political importance of naming in a text like
Rebirth of a Nation, or any text concerned to contest received versions
of history. Ernesto Laclau explicates what is at stake, politically, in pro-
ducing a name for, and then attaching a name to, something, whether
person, place, thing, or group:

For if the unity of the object is the retroactive effect of naming itself,
then naming is not just the pure nominalistic game of attributing
an empty name to a preconstituted subject. It is the discursive con-
struction of the object itself…. [I]f the process of naming of objects
amounts to the very act of their constitution, then their descriptive
features will be fundamentally unstable and open to all kinds of
hegemonic rearticulations. The essentially performative character of
naming is the precondition for all hegemony and politics.
(xiv)

The power to name becomes the power to determine not just what term
an object, or a subject, is called, but its very nature. In Laclau’s version
of naming, it is only this power that opens up political hegemony to any
228  Conclusion
type of change. The problematics of ex-slaves’ attempts to rename them-
selves, then, both as individuals and as a group, demonstrate the central
importance of the name within the context of group identity formation
in Rebirth. The initial mandate to leave behind the designation “slave,”
not merely an occupational label of course, but an all-encompassing
designator, deeming the bearer less than human, was made infinitely
more complex by the matrix of racial classifications and epithets that
were overlaid on the experience of slavery in the United States. Unlike
the otherwise analogous example of the ex-convict, the ex-slave was en-
duringly recognizable by physiological characteristics; the complexity of
this situation only intensified the urgency felt by ex-slaves to escape the
associations of that designator. 20 America’s history of slavery became
inescapable due to this association of markers of blackness with the pur-
ported inferiority of slaves, and thus with that which is considered to be
innately less-than-human.
This brief sketch of some of the problematics of naming in Rebirth
only scratches the surface—it does not begin to address the issue, for
instance, of individual proper names for former slaves and their descen-
dants, nor that of the “slave name” as it developed in the Black Power
Movement. It does, however, point toward the contexts under which
renaming can take place as an effective act of “hegemonic rearticula-
tion.” Under whose authority can this renaming take place? And how
can texts—in this case, collage texts—illuminate this act of resignifica-
tion? In order to extend this line of questioning, I will now turn to a very
different collage text, one that tells a new version of an older history,
using a collage technique that, in appearance if not in reality, is willfully
archaic.

*****

Proper names enter Howe’s Singularities through a description of subur-

ban sprawl. Commercial names fight for precedence with those that are
literary or historical in origin. In the prose introduction to “Thorow,”
one of the three long poems that make up the book, Howe juxtaposes
multiple sentences, one after the other, that make reference to names of
people, places, and books: Lake George, McDonalds, Howard Johnson,
Ramada Inn, Dairy Mart, Donut-Land, the Adirondacks, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Thoreau, Sir Humfrey Gilbert, A New Passage To
Cataaia, Ktaadn. Onomastic significance is constantly and purposefully
in flux in this volume, a collage that relies on the juxtaposition of early
American archival material and late twentieth-century critical theory.
Howe’s poems insist on the recollection of proper names—both of peo-
ple and places—as a refusal of the erasure of the past. At the same time,
however, through the proliferation of names from incommensurable cul-
tures, through nonstandardized spellings of names, and through archaic
 Conclusion  229
names that have been lost, these names’ revisionist account of colonial
history calls into question both the singularity and the authority presup-
posed by the act of naming itself. This interrogation of naming is one
of the ways that Howe’s poetry “both invokes and unsettles her source
material and its itemization of the American landscape” (Bloomfield 71).
Naming in Singularities, as Jenny White claims, is not only an “indi-
cation of a claim, but also of the right to define: a place does not exist
­before it is named, and naming, even renaming, creates a new place”
(251). However, these “new places” created by naming, or, more fre-
quently, by renaming, are ones that likely rearticulate images of places,
people, and events that previously existed but perhaps didn’t align with a
particular vision of history. Though Howe recognizes the power of nam-
ing as e­ xplicated by Kripke and Laclau, she is skeptical that this power is
likely to be used by those who need it the most: individuals and groups
whose ability to name has been usurped or stolen.
Howe frequently recovers names to rediscover histories that have been
overlooked or remain unsought. Her motives for uncovering history’s
lost, buried, or forgotten figures are colored by a sense of her own com-
plicity with the “victors” who have written that history, and who con-
tinue to profit by it. As she explains in the introduction to “Thorow”:
“In the seventeenth century European adventurer-traders burst through
the forest to discover this particular long clear body of fresh water. They
brought our story to it” (41, emphasis added). The first-person plural
possessive pronoun carries a heavy charge. All of Howe’s poetry artic-
ulates grave doubts about the effectiveness of discourse ever to com-
municate anything other than victor’s stories; yet, it also insists on the
importance—the necessity—of the attempt to speak. As she herself has
claimed:

I believe there are stories that need to be told again differently. I

believe with Walter Benjamin that the story is in danger of being
lost the minute someone opens one’s mouth to speak; but you’ve got
to open your mouth to speak, and there is a story, and it’s probably
going to be lost anyway, but whatever the story is, whether you call
it fact or fiction, or an original version, it’s something real.
(Keller, “Interview” 30–1)

The notion of not just telling, but retelling, stories (that is, telling them
in a new way and to new effect) is part of her performance of textual
resignification. Like many of the artists covered in this book, Howe
uses the juxtapositional power of collage against settled narratives,
the ones that everyone is already too ready to hear. As Ann Keniston
claims, for Howe, to create “is to reuse what already existed and thus
to remake older texts” (170). In the most radical example of her use of
fragmented collage poetics in this book, there is a near-mirror-image
230  Conclusion
effect across two pages onto which words appear as if they had been
tossed at random (56–7) (see Figure 1.1). As the eyes of the reader—for
these pages represent her poetry at its most visual—work to make sense
of the images created for her by the letters on the page, the first clue
that she may grasp is that these two pages reflect each other and that
they repeat each other exactly. However, closer inspection suggests that
this is not the case. Rather, here are two differing sides of the same story:

Parted with the Otterware Of the far nations

at the three Rivers, & are over the lakes
Gone to have a Treaty Messengers say
with the French at Oswego The War Belt
& singing their war song & singing their war song
The French Hatchet The French Hatchet
Messages Messages
(56) (57)

These two parallel passages seem to describe the same events but from
different perspective, using the page’s open field to make manifest the
slipperiness of narratives as they become settled into history. They are
examples of Howe’s use of the poetic line’s juxtaposition as a means of
“entering and sympathizing across lines of estrangement or aggression”
(New 271), quite literally as these lines express multiple versions, from
different sides, of the preparations for war.
These pages from “Thorow” are among the most striking example of
Howe’s use of the page as a visual plane in her poetry. The attempt to
read the text on these two pages becomes an exercise in reading a map
of signs: one may read a section on one page, and then turn to the second
page, turning the book around and searching for a correspondence on
the opposing side. But the text also challenges the reader to understand
poetry as a “physical object, a spatial and visual artifact, in which words
and letters are images to be placed like lines and colors on the white
space” of the page (Bruns 36). Not only the content of the lines but also
the formal strategy of their juxtapositional placement on the page enacts
this “struggle to resist imprinting and impression, containment and en-
closure” (Collis 46), a struggle mirrored between the denotative content
of the words and their visual appearance; even this mirroring is again
reduplicated through the appearance of the two facing pages, mirroring
each other. 21
Although the words here are largely whole and recognizable as such,
the syntactic units that readers look for, even rely upon to construct or-
der (sentences, or at least phrases), often resist such discursive coherence.
As Tony Lopez claims, Howe’s “radical eisthesis [indentation] forces us
to experience the lines [of the poem] also as abstract design, prior to
 Conclusion  231
the meaning of the words” (206). For instance, in the upper left corner
of page 56, a phrase curves around in a semicircle (“Cannot be/ every/
where I/ entreat/ snapt”) over another word which, upside down, itself
forms a serpentine shape on the page: “Resolution.” The refusal of stan-
dard lineation lends the text an air of temporariness. These pages do
not appear like ones that someone would have arranged this way on
purpose and thus seem to be an accident, one that will be corrected in
due time. The appearance of these words takes part in what Bill Brown
has described as language’s “demediation,” a phenomenon that occurs
when language is “seen and not read, thus losing its linguistic function.”
This demediation depends, paradoxically, on the failure of language’s
legibility as its precondition is the reader’s effort “to read that cluster as
a recognizable sign…. The impact of opacity depends on the expecta-
tion of transparency” (531). In this way, Howe’s poetic texts—as written
words—need not rely on the relative permanence of the (published) page
for authority. In that the United States of America (or what would be-
come the United States) is represented in her poems textually, it “is seen
as a social experiment and the process and meanings are yet to be con-
tested and established” (Lopez 210). This is work that reinvents the page
as a space in which to examine the nature of such text-based authority,
particularly the authority that is given to the victors to tell stories and
give names.
A name, as I have discussed, is a particular type of noun, and one
with a particularly complex relationship to that to which it refers.
With regard to the proper name of a person, this noun functions as
each person’s unique identifier, a distinguishing mark to set him apart
from the multitudes: a singularity. At the same time, there is no lim-
itation on the multiplication of a name. To use anglophone examples,
how many Johns or Marys might there be at any given moment?22 The
nature of place names can be even more complex, as different groups
may disagree over the proper name of a particular place. Howe begins
“Thorow”—even the homophonic title comments on the instability that
inheres in names (Thorow/Thoreau/thorough/throw/through)—with a
prose introduction that considers the history of the naming of Lake
George, New York: “Pathfinding believers in God and grammar spelled
lake into place. They have renamed it several times since. In paternal
colonial systems a positivist efficiency appropriates primal indetermi-
nacy” (41). Howe’s anti-descriptivism is, as I mentioned, more skeptical
about the power of naming than that of Laclau: though the lake existed
before its “discovery” by the European explorers, it does not become
an official “place” until these explorers impose a name on it. However,
this name, whatever its official status then or now, remains in flux and
is capable of being erased multiple times. She continues: “In March,
1987, looking for what is looking, I went down to unknown regions
232  Conclusion
of indifferentiation. The Adirondacks occupied me.” She then quotes
Deleuze and Guattari:

The proper name (nom propre) does not designate an individual;

it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplic-
ities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe oper-
ation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true
proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension
of a multiplicity.
(42; qtd. from A Thousand Plateaus 37)23

The next sentence from the original passage, which Howe does not
quote, reads, “The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive com-
prehended as such in a field of intensity” (37). Thus, the name becomes
a word in the grammatical structure of language, but a very special one
whose borders are incomprehensible and whose potential power is lim-
itless. The only true proper name may be, like that of their example
of Freud’s patient the Wolf-man, a designator made singular by dint of
being nonspecific, and by designating something (or someone) whose
“normal” limitations have been surpassed or ignored.
Howe’s exploration of “unknown regions of indifferentiation” is fol-
lowed by two other quotations concerned with the exploration of other
regions, known and unknown. The first is from Thoreau: “am have
studied out the ponds, got the Indian names straightened out—which
means more crooked—&c. &c.” (ibid.). The second is from Sir Humfrey
Gilbert, in A New Passage to Cataia: “To proove that the Indians afore-
named came not by the Northeast, and that there is no thorow passage
navigable that way” (ibid.). This paratactic juxtaposition of quotations
from radically differing places, times, and perspectives gives rise to an
alienating yet enlightening view of the meaning of the proper name: sin-
gular and multiple, crooked and straight, it can be rearranged so that the
proper custodians are no longer the original inhabitants. The title of the
poem itself, taken from a corrupted spelling of a name of one of these
correspondents (Thoreau), is also used in the next quotation in an en-
tirely different sense, as an archaic spelling of “through” as in “through-
way” or “thoroughfare.” Even the name of Thoreau—who must be
counted, however uneasily, among the “victors” in Howe’s terms, one
of those whose name was not typically subject to such alterations or
corruptions—is here vulnerable to the proliferation of meaning.
Such meditations on the indeterminate meanings of names are a part
of the larger project that Howe has undertaken as a writer, in her use
of fragmented language as a means of exposing and undermining the
power structures and hierarchies that inhere in language. As she stated
in an interview, “language taps an unpredictable power source in all
of us…. [W]ords are used as buoys, and if they start to break up…”
 Conclusion  233
(Foster, “Interview with Susan Howe” 35; final ellipses in original).
The final ellipses in this quotation cover over the threat hidden in the
proper name; this power is even more apparent, and thus even more
carefully guarded, as it carries with it privileges of class and wealth.
This is the conjunction of naming, power, and violence that Howe
drives toward in her collaged introduction: the power to name—or to
rename—a place, a person, or a people is indistinguishable from the
power of ownership. It thus instigates violence, both mythic and real,
since the mythic or symbolic violence of changing a name goes along
with the real violence of wars that are fought to command precisely that
power. The violence that appears on some of these pages, in the sense
of their visual arrangement, is also “quite literal” in that the reader is
drawn in as she “faces the wreckage visually and attempts to read some
or all of the words,” whose visual placement mirrors the violence that
they recount (Harkey 165–6).
The poems that make up the majority of the body of “Thorow” would
seem to deny the appearance of this violence: they appear on the page as
neat columns of text, one or two to a page, and largely in couplets inter-
spersed with single lines. They describe the landscape from the perspec-
tive of the “Scout,” one who both is and is not supposed to be there—an
interloper, but one with an assigned purpose. For the most part, they are
written in standard English but interspersed with words or phrases in ar-
chaic diction and spelling. Simultaneously, Howe makes use of word and
sound play in the poems, so that it is often difficult to know whether one
is reading a word spelled archaically, one that has been rearranged for its
musical qualities, or one that is being used to make an intellectual point
about the multiplicity of meaning. The passages seen here make use of
a variety of these techniques (Figure 6.1). These stanzas, though ap-
pearing neat and orderly on the page, may be “almost impenetrable,” as
they “collage archaic spellings, phrases, and images into images of a dis-
orienting series of largely uninterpretable events” (Middleton, “Open”
638). Though these pages don’t immediately call attention to their visual
design in the manner that some other sections of Singularities do, they,
too, make use of the resources of the page as a visual field.
While the initial strophe in this section relies largely upon the re-
sources of aurality with its many repetitions with differences (must see
and not see/ must not see nothing/ burrow and so burrow/ measuring
mastering/ so empty and so empty) and the second moves into a type of
intellectual word play (dear seem dear cast out/ so many gether together),
the final two strophes vary wildly, moving from archaic s­ pellings—some
of which could be read to imply a dialect, and thus appeal to the ear—
back to the repeated word play of “Revealing traces/ Regulating traces.”
These two lines, not only repeated but also put in italic text both times,
are themselves revealing of a certain anxiety over the poet’s own power
as one whose traces (words) can both reveal and regulate. In these lines,
234  Conclusion

Figure 6.1  Excerpts from Singularities © 1990 by Susan Howe. Published by

Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.

we can see in particular how her work “seems always concerned with
the possibility that in the attempt to give voice to the unvoiced of the
early American landscapes, it may fail, voice only itself, and, thus, be-
come an accomplice in the deceptions and erasures of literature and
history” (Back 56). Her authority to name and rename—to determine
which names are worthy of being brought into her poems, and so worthy
of inclusion in her revisionist history as documentary collage poetry—is
one that is undertaken with trepidation. Bob Perelman describes Howe’s
sense of poetic responsibility, in that while

work[ing] toward discovery of semi-erased traces of suppressed

lives, she seems aware that her own investigation can never escape
the possibility that she is simply adding another layer over what it
 Conclusion  235
wants to reveal: that “discovery” may always be “covery.” This is
the dilemma that the warring singularities of her work reveal.
(Marginalization 136)

This awareness of her own responsibility as a name-er, as one with the

power of naming—not only as a writer, but also as one who was a de-
scendant of the European settlers whose arrogance she decries in the
forward to “Thorow”—is part of the tension present in the work. The
notion of “covery” rather than “dis-covery” is particularly relevant with
a text as intellectually dense and difficult as this one. Outside of any
questions of distribution or access, one might wonder—much as Rebirth
of a Nation was criticized—whether those who aren’t professional liter-
ary critics would have either the opportunity or the inclination to peel
back the layers, to go from “covery” to “dis-covery.” This tension is de-
rived from the same place from which Howe derives her sense of poetic
authority: both from, as Susan Schultz puts it,

a sense of being a member of an oppressed group whose power can

only come from solidarity, and, paradoxically, from her status as a
representative of the dominant culture: white, historical rather than
mythical, and editorial…. Howe’s task as a poet who calls these
roles into question is that of a cross-thinker who fashions her role by
the blending and blurring of traditional hierarchies.
(143)

This tension—like that between regulating and revealing—is also what

makes the shift from the body of the poem (the neat columns of text) to
the final sections a startling one. The contrast in moving from narrow,
well-regulated textual arrangements to these two pages, with their tex-
tual signs splayed all over the pages, only increases the visual impact of
these pieces.
The final two pages are not as visually stunning, but their semantic
power is perhaps even greater (58–9) (Figure 6.2). On page 58, the
largest section of text is arranged in a stairstep pattern, but the (real or
faux) archaisms have become such that they are often not recognizable
as English: “Immeadeat Settlem/ but wandering/ Shenks Ferry people/
unhoused/ at or naer Mohaxt/ elect/ Sacandaga vläie.” At the bottom
of the page, text clashes with text and the textual unit of the word
loses its coherence in the symbolic violence of this page: “last/ reas-
semble/ Union/ mighty/ nd/ war/ brested/ a/ on/ ce/ it/ first” intersects
with, “Awake! top hill demon daunt defiant length”. As these words
imply the movement toward war—real violence—the text displays that
violence on the page (Figure 6.3). The final page of text takes this dis-
integration of language farther: the words on this page are not words,
but merely “shapes grouped on a page” (Joyce 112). Despite having
236  Conclusion

Figure 6.2  Excerpts from Singularities © 1990 by Susan Howe. Published by

Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.

every appearance of being words, and despite often coming very close
to recognizable English words, they have (for the most part) no se-
mantic meaning: “anthen/ uplispth/ enend/ adamap/ blue wov/ thefthe/
folled/ floted/ keen/ Themis/ thou sculling me/ Thiefth.” The last one,
“Thiefth,” momentarily appears to be a proper name, if only for its
capitalization. Instead, though, it is more likely a designation. 24 The
frightening and threatening indeterminacy of names here folds back
 Conclusion  237

Figure 6.3  E
 xcerpts from Singularities © 1990 by Susan Howe. Published by
Wesleyan University Press. Reprinted by permission.

around itself. Howe’s attention to these names and the violence that
can inhere in them, and in the power to name, gives voice momentarily
to those whose language and whose names are not recognized by the
official namers, the storytellers, and the victors and grasps the power
to rename and to reinscribe textual significance. In this moment, she
renames them thieves.

*****

For those who use collage to rewrite American history (Miller, Howe,
but also Muriel Rukeyser and Pound), the choice, according to skepti-
cal critics, involves either appealing to an audience through a straight-
forward, accessible, and familiar format, or creating a sophisticated
and intellectually dense work that few will ever understand or even
see. (This could be said to be Howe’s situation, though Singularities
has been a popular work, in the modest terms of experimental poetry.)
Miller’s work, which reached unprecedented audiences in the United
States and overseas, due to a successful tour of museums, universities,
film festivals, and other similar venues, and a great deal of good pub-
licity (not the least of which was a profile on National Public Radio),
can, in some sense, provide a test case for collage as political art. 25
Can a visually sophisticated work reach a popular audience without
utterly compromising its intended purpose? In the reviews of Rebirth
that I have read, reviewers have critiqued the film largely over two is-
sues. Some note that, as I mentioned earlier, Miller’s elaborations on
­Griffith’s images not only fail to erase the beauty of those images but
also add to that beauty; thus, they risk failing to disrupt adequately
the allure created by Griffith’s technical artistry. 26 Others claim that
238  Conclusion
Miller’s additions to the text are merely pretentious fluff, that the ra-
cialized ugliness of Griffith’s images is clear in its own right, and that
what can be seen as the artistry of his contribution to the work only
risks alienating audience members who could most benefit from an un-
derstanding of the origins of Birth of a Nation. 27 What these reviewers
ignore is what Miller has claimed as his primary motivation for his new
“version” of Birth of a Nation: the way that the content of the film in-
heres within its form, and how it is precisely this combination of form
and content that creates its particular power.
This combination of form and content—how they integrally support
each other—is precisely the power of collage, which has succeeded as an
artistic method and as a political one, but not for the same works. It has
been fully incorporated into the realm of “high art,” true at least since
“The Art of Assemblage” exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art (1961). Collage’s success as a persuasive tool has been evident for
almost the same period. However, this success has been most evident
in television commercials and other products of mass or commercial
culture. Experimental poetry has failed, thus far, to reach a popular
audience; shortened attention spans and reduced public school budgets
would not predict a change in this outcome. We might, on the other
hand, return to the example of conceptual writing to think through
how experimental texts can or cannot effectively present political mes-
sages. Most conceptual writing presents itself in the guise of easily
recognizable forms: the newspaper, the web page, and the traffic report.
The convergence of the activities framed as “art” by self-proclaimed
conceptual writers, and activities not framed as “art” by members of
the public would seem to indicate that not only has the aforementioned
combination of art and life already happened (though not in the way
imagined by the avant-garde) but that the desired “shock” of disloca-
tion can now better be found within received forms than outside of
them. (Or perhaps that all forms are, at this point, already “received.”)
The shock of dislocation that was initially envisioned by the avant-
garde originators of collage was triggered in part by the willingness on
the artist’s part to make the seams of collage visible: to make it appar-
ent where, when, and how he imported outside material into his work.
(It is also true that, at that moment, it would have been much more
difficult not to make this apparent, at least in the visual arts.) Jagged
edges, quotation marks, citational markers, or jumps in narrative or
visual continuity: all of these markers of collage were an affront to the
traditional mimetic illusions of coherence, originality, and craft that
defined what art was, in opposition to the rest of the world, to “life.”
This is how collage could contain a political critique within its form,
outside of considerations of content.
This has continued to be true, to a degree, for those artists who have
continued to work within the “tradition” of cut-and-paste collage;
 Conclusion  239
however, one side effect of the loosely chronological structure of this
book is the increasingly apparent impact that digital recording and edit-
ing techniques has had on collage. These technologies have profoundly
changed its nature. As the range of possibilities of what one can ac-
complish with digital technology continues to increase, the line of de-
marcation between what can be considered collage and what is simply
a “normal” string of images will continue to blur, and may eventually
disappear. Already, the choice to make the formal aspects of collage
readily apparent to the eye or ear—to show its “seams”—results in a
type of willing archaism. Howe’s work, with her resolute commitment
“to paper-based media” (Jennings 664), is a fine example of this type
of visual juxtaposition. Singularities contains many pages that appear
as if a clumsy typesetter had tripped and so scattered the individual
letters. Howe has continued to produce collage poetry in this vein, in
works such as That This (2010).
My argument has been, however, that in addition to (or perhaps, be-
cause of) this form-inhering critique, collage has often been used, by a
wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American artists, as
formal strategy for creating works whose manifest content was politi-
cal in nature, and that these collage works’ form and content combined
to make a particularly potent brand of political art. The mass cultural
and commercial venues for collage—largely advertising, but also genres
like, for instance, hip hop music in its most commercial guises—have
consistently pushed their products to the technological forefront in the
use of digital technology for creating their versions of collage. The rea-
son for this is apparent, and ingenious: as collage has functioned as a
form of persuasion, the decision to smooth over those borders and edges
makes that persuasion nearly, if not totally, invisible to those who are
being persuaded. If the example of television advertising has taught us
anything, it is that the less the audience member recognizes that there is
an attempt to persuade her, the more likely it is that she will be recep-
tive to this message. Like their more commercially minded colleagues,
collage artists who wish to make political art have a need to persuade
their audience that their vision of an imagined future, or a change in the
present, is not only plausible, but desirable. Thus, the artist who is able
to imagine a new and different future will have a viable motivation to
attempt to create the most persuasive circumstances possible, even if this
means utilizing techniques associated with more commercially success-
ful enterprises.
I have offered this analysis in part as a way of concluding one version
of my overall argument for this book, which is that one of the important
formal aspects of collage that has been largely overlooked in previous
discussions has been collage’s tendency to allow for considerations of the
political and/or the social in what has often been mistaken for hermetic
and obscure experimental works. Works that are challenging formally
240  Conclusion
have, often even by quite savvy critics, been taken as necessarily (only)
self-referential, having little to no relevance for those concerned with
art’s impact on the outside world. Quite the contrary, the referential
nature of collage—the way in which juxtaposition almost necessarily
involves bringing disparate ideas into contact—makes it an ideal format
for the consideration of challenging ideas, for “trying out” as much as
arguing for ways of thinking through some of the most important, and
yet difficult, political questions of the past century.
This conclusion has attempted to show, in several broad strokes, how
artists working in a what could be considered a post-collage environ-
ment have continued to use the juxtapositional strategies derived from
collage, whether they work directly within a “cut-and-paste” or explic-
itly citational aesthetic (as both Howe and Miller do) or whether they
work within (apparently) normative syntax and grammar (as Andrews
and Goldsmith do). This is an aesthetic that, as I argued at the begin-
ning of this book, is leading to the end of what can properly be termed
the “literary” as a distinct, artistic mode of production. This is not to
say that no more documents called “novels,” “poems,” “short stories,”
or “plays” should ever be written, no more MFAs granted, or that En-
glish Departments can close up shop. Quite the contrary, surely all of
these things will continue as they have been for the foreseeable if not
indefinite future. Rather, I am arguing that the most formally intrigu-
ing and innovative textual work is no longer being produced within a
genre category with clear boundaries and borders. The juxtapositions
necessary to collage—the violations of the very borders establishing a
hierarchy among both texts and their producers that are the essence
of what collage is—have also brought to a close the clear separation
between those who are authorized artistic producers (“writers”) and
those who are not. The floodgates have been opened: “poetry is for
everyone.”

Notes
1 For instance, in the “North by Northwest Interview” from 1990, he states:
… [I]t’s been the case for a long time, maybe the last ten years [since
1980], where writing is editing, writing is a constructing of previously
generated materials, similar to what some of my filmmaker friends do—
go out and shoot short chucks of footage, go onto the flatbed, assemble
films in the editing process. As opposed to writing out draft poems in
notebooks—first thought best thought. I haven’t found this to be the
case.
(Paradise & Method 103)
2 Andrews has made it clear that his texts are not literally found language: he
collects language in Step 1; in Step 2, he “works” on his findings to trans-
form them into what we later read.
 Conclusion  241
3 See, for instance, fellow language poet Bob Perelman’s chapter on Andrews
in The Marginalization of Poetry.
Perelman claims that
Bruce Andrews, the person, is in evidence in spots throughout the book.
There are moments of wry-to-dour literary politics that can only be con-
strued as personal…. One small passage is straight autobiography…. But
such moments allowing a reader to narrativize the person writing are anom-
alous. There is another dimension, however, where the writer is constantly
present: the activity of Andrews’s cultural aggression is impossible to ignore.
(104–5)
4 I assume here that Andrews’s works are being read by someone who wishes
to “make sense” of the text. One can also imagine reading processes that do
not attempt to make syntactic or narrative sense out of the text.
5 Despite Goldsmith’s characterization, the work of “language poets” is quite
varied and while some, like Bernstein, have, literally, pulverized syntax and
meaning, others, like Lyn Hejinian (in My Life) and Ron Silliman (in The
Alphabet and The Chinese Notebook), frequently work within received
meaning and syntax, bringing their projects much closer to what conceptual
writers are doing.
6 Some print magazines do utilize a similar technique of printing the ends of
longer articles at the back of the magazine.
7 That is, the page numbers from the original issue of the Times of course exist in
Day just as all characters of text do, but since each page of this issue of the Times
is recorded by multiple pages of Day, there is no longer a one-to-one correspon-
dence between page citation and the location of the conclusion of an article.
8 Several prominent critics have questioned the degree to which Goldsmith’s
published texts align with his pronouncements about those texts, in ef-
fect questioning his honesty or integrity regarding his own “uncreative”
processes. It is not clear to me what the force of this accusation is. If the
interest in the text has to do with the intellectual challenges put forward by
its gestural power, it seems to me that examining the text for evidence that
Goldsmith “cheated” seems to miss the point altogether, unless the point
is that craft-based notions of artistic production are somehow inescapable.
9 One might also recall Pound’s parable of Agassiz and the fish from ABC of
Reading when considering how one attempts to “know something” (17–8).
10 And neither of them are April 11, 1954, the day put forward by William
Tunstall-Pedoe (University of Cambridge-trained computer scientist) as the
most boring day since the turn of the twentieth century. When this story was
posted on npr.org (on November 30, 2010), the writer challenged readers to
post counterexamples of exciting events that happened on that date in the
comments section. To this point, there are no comments on the story.
11 With regard to the question of the “literariness” of conceptual writing,
­Jeffrey T. Nealon pertinently asks,
If advertising and the greeting card industry have completely territorial-
ized short, pithy expressions of ‘authentic’ sentiment, showing us how to
reenchant even the most mundane corners of everyday life… then what’s
left for poetry to do in the contemporary world?
(114)
12 In 2009, Goldsmith produced The Day, a transcription of the Times from
September 11, 2001, which, as Jeffrey Gray describes it,
242  Conclusion
did not describe the events of that day… thus its transcription constitutes
a deliberate irony…. [T]he difference between Day and The Day would
seem to illustrate the two poles of passivity and intervention, even though
both experiments are examples of ‘not writing.’
(96)
13 Consider, for two examples as opposite ends of a particular spectrum, the
now five editions of Tom Phillips’s A Humument, or the changes George
Lucas has made to rereleases of his Star Wars films, much to the films’ fans’
shock and horror.
14 One might also think of the books by conceptual writers, self-published
through Lulu.com, which are made up of the authors’ Twitter feeds or dis-
cussions that have taken place on Facebook timelines.
15 Griffith’s film was, up until at least the 1960s, used as a recruitment tool for
the KKK.
16 Throughout this discussion, I refer to the version of Rebirth of a Nation
performed at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art during November
2004. In 2007, Miller released a DVD version of Rebirth of a Nation. Of
necessity, this version is quite different from the live version. There is a sin-
gle frame of images, which loosely corresponds to the central frame from
the live version. This frame shows the main narrative of Griffith’s film, with
some graphic additions. There is also a fairly intrusive voice-over commen-
tary on the film. The experience of watching the DVD version of Rebirth
was, for this viewer, somewhat disappointing after having been acquainted
with the live version. It was much more strongly and pedagogically rhetori-
cal. This may have been inevitable to some degree, given the now-static na-
ture of the text-as-published-disc. It is this version to which James J. Brown,
Jr.’s article, “Composition in the Dromosphere,” refers. Brown compares
Miller’s work somewhat unfavorably to the work of mash-up artist Girl
Talk. It is unfortunate that Brown used only the DVD version of Rebirth
of a Nation when writing his article as many of the criticisms that he levies
against Miller’s work, I would argue, apply only to the experience of view-
ing the DVD. Furthermore, Brown’s approbation for the “fast” rhetorical
style of Girl Talk (against what he describes as the “slow” style of Miller)
elides the relative straightforwardness of the political message that Girl
Talk attempts to express—anti-censorship, pro-free use and sampling—­
versus Miller’s target, the morass of American race relations, post-slavery,
and the way that these relations are reified through media portrayal.
17 In 2017, Miller has resumed performances of Rebirth of a Nation.
18 Jacqueline Stewart attempted to broach this issue with Miller during the
discussion session following the performance of Rebirth at the Chicago Mu-
seum of Contemporary Art; apparently, it was not a question that he was
then prepared to address.
  The geometric signs that are assigned to individual characters in Rebirth
seem to be a translation of the tradition, during the silent film era, of the
musical motif that many of the musical accompanists would design for each
character during their live performances.
19 A contemporary film that puts the concept of “blackface” to a very different
use, despite the similarity in imagery, is Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000).
20 The exception to this generalization is of course the individual who is able
to “pass,” an offense for which lynching was often deemed an appropriate
punishment. The ferocity that passing provoked when exposed exemplifies
the importance, for the categorical definition of “whiteness,” of the distinc-
tion between black and white.
 Conclusion  243
21 Though the visual aspects of Howe’s poetry are something that critics rou-
tinely recognize, it is also something that most literary critics have done
little more than recognize. In her book “The Small Space of a Pause”: Su-
san Howe’s Poetry and the Spaces Between, Elisabeth Joyce devotes an en-
tire chapter, “When Text Becomes Images,” to a very thorough discussion
of the various strategies that Howe employs in the visual treatment of her
poetry. Likewise, Kaplan Harris’s article “Susan Howe’s Art and Poetry,
1968–1974,” about Howe’s early poetry and art, is exemplary of the type of
scholarship that has so far been missing from the many studies of her poetry.
22 Or Bruces? Bruce Conner says of his own exploration of the stability of the
name:
I started collecting Bruce Conners because in 1962 someone drove me
by Bruce Conner’s gym and I realized there was another Bruce Con-
ner. Then I started finding out that there were still other Bruce Con-
ners in the process of determining identity…. I ritualistically acted out
the search for identity by going to the library and looking through all
the telephone directories of all the states in the union, looking up Bruce
Conners. Finally I had collected about 14 Bruce Conners so I thought I’d
have a convention, hire a hotel ballroom…. On the marquee it would say
WELCOME BRUCE CONNER. You would walk in and get a button
that said, “Hello! My name is Bruce Conner” and you would have a pro-
gram with a person named Bruce Conner who would introduce the main
speaker, whose name was Bruce Conner.
(Hatch 5)
23 Neither authority, in this instance, is American or British. Though the
French were involved in the “conquest of the New World,” they were rele-
gated to the sidelines relatively quickly.
24 It also has the appearance of a Germanic form of a verb. “Thiefth” is the
title Howe gave to the 2006 audio recording she produced of sections of Sin-
gularities that she read aloud alongside music from composer David Grubbs.
25 It is true that the audience members most likely to attend a performance
art piece at a university or a museum are also likely to share already the
anti-racist views of Rebirth. However, the work has also been performed
at other larger, and thus less homogenous, venues in the United States and
overseas. In any case, despite the likelihood that Miller is largely “preaching
to the choir,” I can hardly regret the size of his audience (for its size if not its
diversity) when compared to the usual audience for a work of experimental
performance art. Even if the content is not controversial to many of those
who saw it at, say, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, it also
seems likely that the form would be provocative in its own right.
26 This charge could also be made against Conner’s Marilyn Times Five, al-
though in a slightly different register.
  One version of this charge can be seen in the following review: “While
Rebirth is aesthetically and aurally rich, its complexity undermines Miller’s
efforts to create a space for rethinking the politics of race. Instead his seam-
less transmutations provide a slippery surface upon which both everything
and nothing can be projected” (Milutis 16).
27 For instance, in a review published in the Harvard Gazette, the reviewer
writes,
[W]hat remains of Griffith’s images still has power to move us, regardless
of how morally and politically repugnant the premises on which they
are based or the ideas they convey, perhaps because nearly a century of
244  Conclusion
cinematic imagery, derived from Griffith’s pioneering efforts, have con-
ditioned us to react in this way.
(Gewerz npn)
The reviewer offers up this observation as a critique of Rebirth of a Nation.

Yet, this is precisely the intended point of Miller’s piece: that the enduring
power of Griffith’s images inheres in their beauty and their formal artistry,
even for those who understand all too well how deeply, ideologically prob-
lematic they are.
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Index
Agee, James (Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men) 78
Amaral, Nestor (“Holiday in
Brazil”) 146
Andrews, Bruce 16–17, 211–216,
222, 240, 240n2, 241n3, 241n4,
work: I Don’t Have Any Paper, So
Shut Up, or Social Romanticism
211–215, 222
anti-communism 132n27, 168,
183–184, 193, 209n33
Antin, David 1, 4, 7, 12, 216
Anuncia/Nunca 193, 201
Apollinaire, Guillaume 18n6
Apple Knockers and the Coke 149,
155, 157, 164n30, 165n35
“Art of Assemblage” exhibit at
Museum of Modern Art 6, 238
Atget, Eugène 162n15
Auping, Michael 121–123, 131n24
authenticity 48, 81, 97, 137, 154, 157,
206n8, 241n11
Banash, David 8
Baraka, Amiri /LeRoi Jones
(Blues People) 189
Baxter, Richard (The Saint’s
Everlasting Rest) 93n22
Bedouin culture 194, 202–203
Benet, Stephen Vincent 76
Benjamin, Walter 8, 15,16, 26, 39–50,
51n7, 52n27, 53n29, 53n30,
53n31, 53n32, 53n33, 53n35,
123, 128n5, 137, 144, 157, 160,
160n1, 183, 229, works: “One Way
Street” 41, 52n27, “Surrealism:
the Last Snapshot of the European
Intelligentsia” 41–42, 53n30, The
Arcades Project 16, 52n27, 53n35,
“Konvolut N” or “On the Theory
of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”
42–43, “Konvolut O [Prostitution,
Gambling]” 43–45, “On Language
as Such and the Language of Man”
53n31, The Origin of German
Tragic Drama 123 “The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” 53n33, 137,
concept of “aura” 53n33, 53n34,
137, 144, 157–58
Berlant, Lauren 99, 114
Berger, Charles 75
Bergman, David 91n12, 92n19
Bernes, Jasper 18n10
Bernstein, Charles 10, 36, 52n25, 212,
241n5
Bernstein, Michael André 115
Bersani, Leo 119
Bertholf, Robert 129n6, 130n12
The Bible 75, 83, 210n45
Black Arts movement 168, 170, 180,
206n6, n8
Black Power movement 167, 179–180,
208n30, 228
Blaser, Robin 100, 112
Blackmur, R. P. 92n17
Blesh, Rudi 6
blues music and poetry 95n37,
170–175, 177–179, 185, 205,
207n13, 207n15, 208n26, 209n34
The Book of the Dead (ancient
Egyptian text) 78, 82–84, 94n33
Brakhage, Stan 157, 161n5
Brecht, Bertolt 109, 123, with Kurt
Weill The Rise and Fall of the City
of Mahagonny opera 109
Breines, Wini 131n21
Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad 21, 22
Brock, James 93n28
Brown, Bill 231
264 Index
Brown, James J. 242n16
Brown, Michael 12, 14, 19n16
Brown, Norman O. 131n22
Browning, Robert (“Sordello”) 35
Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) 75,
91n12
Buck-Morss, Susan 17n1, 51n7,
53n27
Bürger, Peter 8, 17n1
Burroughs, William S. 12, 16, 19n14
Bush, Ronald 35, 52n18
Cage, John 16, 218, 220
Caldwell, Erskine (You Have Seen
Their Faces) 78
Carroll, Lewis (Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland) 117, 120–121, 124
Chinitz, David 209n33
citationality in poetry (versus
crypticism) 168, 170–174, 176, 178,
182, 184, 187, 197, 205, 206n7
Civil Rights movement 167–168,
172, 173, 175–179, 182–183, 185,
208n30
Coca-cola 149, 155–156
the Cold War 13, 97, 99, 101, 105,
109, 112–117, 121, 124, 127, 128,
128n2, 129n6, 131n21, 168, 175,
184
colonialism 23, 68, 139, 141–144,
162n17, 167, 178, 208n28, 229, 231
Communist Party 36, 52n26, 53n35,
95n37
community 100–103, 106, 112, 122,
125, 128, 169, 174, 176–177, 184,
206n6, 207n21
conceptual art 216–217, 221
conceptual writers 3, 9–17, 17n3,
19n10, 19n17, 93n23, 211, 213,
216–222, 238, 241n5, 241n11,
242n14
Conner, Bruce 16, 134–138, 149–159,
160, 161n3, 161n6, 161n7,
164n27, 164n30, 165n36, 165n37,
165n38, 166n39, 166n40, 243n22,
243n26, works: Breakaway 152,
155, 165n37, with Toni Basil 155,
Cosmic Ray 165n37, Marilyn Times
Five 16, 134, 136, 149–159, 160,
161n6, 164n30, 165n36, 166n39,
224, 243n26, A Movie 137, 161n6,
161n7
Conrad, Joseph 139, work: Heart of
Darkness 139, 141, 144
Coontz, Stephanie 131n21
Cornell, Joseph 5, 16, 134, 135, 136,
137, 138–148, 149, 159, 160,
161n3, 161n4, 161n6, 161n7,
162n8, 162n9, 162n10, 162n14,
162n16, 163n20, 163n21, 163n23,
164n25, 166n39, 224, works:
boxes 140–141, 144, “A Journey
Album for Hedy Lamarr” 147, Rose
Hobart 16, 134, 136, 138–148,
159, 160, 161n7, 162n9, 162n10,
162n13, 162n14, 163n21, 164n25,
224, 226
Cran, Rona 8
Curtis, Tony 154, 165n33, 166n42
Dada 25, 161n4
Dalí, Salvador 132n28, 138–139, The
Phenomena of Ecstasy 132n28
Dante (Inferno) 21, 22
Davidson, Michael 78, 80, 94n29
Davie, Donald 51n12
Dayton, Tim 82, 94n31
de Cabestan, Guillem and Soremonda
33–35
di Dio, Françoise (Les Dogon) 192
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari
228, 232
de Nerval, Gerald (El Desdichado)
21, 22
Dewey, Anne 129n6
dialectical image 26, 39–50, 52n27,
53n36, 53n37, 128n5, 130n15, 183
Diederichsen, Diedrich 154
“Dixie” 181–182
Dixon, Thomas F. (The Clansman) 226
Djamil 202
documentary collage 45–50, 55, 58,
62–64, 70–71, 75–78, 81, 83–86,
109, 174, 187, 217, 234
Dogon culture 169, 191–193, 198,
203, 206n3
Doheney, Ben 94n30
the “dozens” 168, 179–180, 206n8,
208n27
Dubrow, Jessica 61n36
Duchamp, Marcel 1, 3, 14, 217
duende 195, 210n44
Duncan, Michael 119
Duncan, Robert 15, 49, 97–117,
122, 124–125, 126–128, 128n3,
128n4, 128n5, 129n6, 129n7,
129n8, 129n9, 129n10, 130n12,
130n13, 130n14, 130n19,

131n21, 131n22, 132n25,
132n29, 132n30, 194, 210n42,
works: “An African Elegy” 129n,
“Apprehensions” 130n19, “The
Ballad of the Enamord Mage”
127, Bending the Bow 129n10,
“Dante Etudes: The Household”
125, “Often I am Permitted to
Return to a Meadow” 130n19,
The Opening of the Field 127,
“Passages” series 15, 101,
104–105, 130n13, 130n19,
“Passages 1: Tribal Memories” 101,
105–109, 113, “The Architecture:
Passages 9” 101, 109–115, 127,
“The Homosexual in Society”
102–104, 129n9, 132n30, 129n10,
“A Sequence of Lines for H. D.’s
Birthday” 130n19, father Edward
Symmes 130n19, concept of grand
collage 102, 104–109, 113, 122,
theory of “household” 97, 101,
105, 106, 109, 112, 114–115, 116,
120, 124–125, 127, 128, 128n2,
n3, 129n6, 130n19, 131n21
duPlessis, Rachel Blau 131n22
Dworkin, Craig 3–4, 220
East of Borneo 139, 141–146, 148,
159, 160, 162n10, 162n14, 162n17,
164n25
Eisenstein, Sergei 17n1, 36–39, 52n25,
52n26, 135, 161n3, 161n4, 226,
works: “The Cinematographic
Principle and the Ideogram” 36, “A
Dialectical Approach to Film Form”
37, 39, 135, “Film Language”
52n26, Battleship Potemkin 39,
October 39
Eliot, T. S. 1, 4, 21–23, 50n3, 50n6,
62–63, 90n5, works: “The Function
of Criticism” 4, The Waste Land
21–23, 50n3, 50n6
Ellington, Duke 186, 190, 202, 209n34
Ellison, Ralph (Invisible Man) 180
Erikson, Darlene 92n20
Ernst, Max 123, 132n29, work: Une
Semaine de Bonté 132n29
the esoteric versus the exoteric 17, 38,
50n6, 204
Ettinger, Bracha 57
Euripedes (The Trojan Women) 32
Evans, Walker (Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men) 78
Index  265
Feld, Steven 210n47
Felman, Shoshana (Testimony) 55–57
Fenollosa, Ernest (“The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium
for Poetry”) 26–28, 34–37, 51n10,
51n12, 51n14, 189, 209n37, 26–27,
32, 34–37, 189
Le Figaro 59
Finkelstein, Norman 129n6, 197, 203
Flarf 9–10, 18n10
Foucault, Michel 122–123
Fraser, Nancy 98
Fredman, Stephen 18n7, 104, 109,
128n3, 129n6
Free Speech movement (Berkeley) 113
freedom 41–42, 75, 120, 168, 172,
176, 180, 183–186, 215
Freud, Sigmund 56, 68, 109–110,
115–116, 125–126, 131n22, 131n23,
232, work: “The Uncanny” 109–110,
116, 125–126, 128, 131n23, concept
of the Unheimlich 110, 116–117,
patient the Wolf-man 232
Friedan, Betty (The Feminine Mystique)
114–115, 128n1, 131n21
Futurism 25, 161n4
Gaudi 132n28
Gauley Tunnel disaster 15, 76–88,
95n37
Gelpi, Albert 129n6
Gillespie, Dizzie 167
Giraudoux, Jean 59
Girl Talk 242n16
Gnosticism 15, 110, 115, 127,
129n10, 130n15, 193–194, 197,
202, 210n45
Godwin, William 93n24
Goldsmith, Kenneth 3, 10–17, 17n3,
19n13, 19n16, 19n17, 20n18,
211, 216–222, 240, 241n5, 241n8,
241n12, works: “Being Boring”
216–221, “The Body of Michael
Brown” 12–14, 19n17, Day 3, 13,
19n13, 216–222, 241n7, The Day
241n12
Goodman, Benny as “the king of
swing” 169
Graves, Robert (The White Goddess)
130n12
Gregory, Elizabeth 59, 91n11
Greenaway, Peter (The Cook, the
Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover)
52n19
266 Index
Griaule, Marcel 210n40, works:
with Germain Dieterlen The Pale
Fox 191, Conversations with
Ogotemmêli 193
Griffith, D. W. 16, 223–226,
237–238, 242n15, 242n16,
243n27, work: Birth of a Nation
16, 223–226, 237–238, 242n15,
242n16, 243n27
Grubbs, David 243n24
Gunning, Tom 136, 161n4, concept
of “cinema of attractions” 136,
141–142, 157, 161n4
Habermas, Jürgen 97–99, 114,
122, 128, work: The Structural
Transformation of the Public
Sphere 98
Harlem 170, 174, 177, Langston
Hughes as poet “low rate” of
Harlem 170
Harlem Renaissance 177
Harris, Kaplan 243n21
Hase, Carl Benedict 44–45
Hatch, Brian 156–157
Hauptman, Jodi 161n6, 162n10,
162n15, 163n21
Heartfield, John 123
Hejinian, Lyn 241n5
“Hesitation Blues” 175, 179
Hicok, Bethany 70, 91n12, 92n19
history 9, 13–16, 17n4, 21, 23, 27,
30–33, 38–43, 45–50, 52n22,
53n29, 54n38, 54n39, 54n40,
57, 65, 77–78, 80, 83, 89, 94n30,
99–101, 104, 113,117, 122, 123,
124, 135, 140, 142, 167–170, 176,
183, 186, 192, 194, 197, 200, 205,
206n6, 207n11, 219–222, 223–228,
228–237
Hobart, Rose (actress) 139–145
Hobbes, Thomas (The Leviathan)
124–125
Hoffman, E. T. A. (“The Sand Man”)
131n23
Hokanson, Robert 207n17
Holley, Margaret 91n13
Howe, Susan 5, 15, 24, 46–49,
54n39, 211, 222, 228–237,
239–40, 243n21, 243n24, works:
“Articulations of Sound Forms
in Time” 46, 48, Singularities 24,
46–47, 222, 228–29, 233–237, 239,
243n24, That This 239, Thiefth
54n39, 243n24, “Thorow” 24,
54n39, 228–237
Hoy, Dan 18n10
Hughes, Langston 15, 167–186, 197,
205, 206n5, 205n7, 205n8, 207n9,
207n11, 207n12, 207n13, 207n14,
207n15, 207n16, 207n17, 208n24,
208n25, 208n26, 208n27, 208n30,
209n31, 209n32, 209n33, 224,
works: Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods
for Jazz 15, 167–186, 205, 206n5,
206n8, 207n9, 207n13, 207n16,
207n17, 208n25, 208n29, 224,
Montage of a Dream Deferred 168,
171, 174, “The Negro Artist and
the Racial Mountain” 171, 183,
186, The Weary Blues 171, Fine
Clothes to the Jew 171, Fight for
Freedom 183
Hunter, Arline 149–157, 159,
164n28n29
Hurston, Zora Neale 185
ideogram 14, 26–37, 39, 45, 49–50,
50n5, 51n14, 51n17, 65, 128n5,
130n15, 135, 189
illustrated songs 146, 163n22
Jameson, Fredric 17n4
Janis, Harriet 6
Jarnot, Lisa 130n19
Jay, Martin 18n9
jazz, experimental 167–178, 182,
185–186, 189–190,194, 200, 205,
206n8, 207n11, 207n13, 207n15,
207n16, 207n17, as bebop 167,
169, 173–176, 189, 207n13, as
post-bop 173–174, 189, as hard
bop 173, 175, 207n13
Jenkins, Bruce 157, 164n28
Jenkins, G. Matthew 129n6
Jennings, Michael 40, 53n32
Jess (Burgess Collins) 16, 49, 97–102,
109, 116, 117–128, 128n3, 130n19,
131n21, 131n24, 132n25, 132n28,
132n29, paste-ups 16, 100–101,
117, 120, 122–125, works: The
Enamord Mage: Translation #6
126–128, Goddess Because…
117, The Mouse’s Tale 16, 100,
101, 117–126, 132n28, Narkissos
132n25
Johnson, David K. 132n27
Johnson, Keith 44

Johnson, Robert 225
Jones, Bill T. (dance company) 225
Jones, Meta DuEwa 206n8
Joyce, Elisabeth 92n20, 93n24,
243n21
Kadlec, David 85–86, 92n17, 94n29,
95n35, 95n39
Kafka, Franz (“The
Metamorphosis”) 143
Kahan, Benjamin 91n11
Kalaidjian, Walter 83, 94n29, 95n29
Kaluli people (Muni birds) 200
Kane, Daniel 129n6
Katz, Daniel 27
Katz, Jonathan 132n26
Keenaghan, Eric 129n6
Keller, Lynn 67
Keller, Marjorie 164n25
Kenner, Hugh 30, 51n9, 51n10,
51n11, 52n24
Keniston, Ann 229
Krauss, Rosalind 6–7
Kripke, Saul 227–229
Ku Klux Klan 223, 242n15
Kuspit, Donald 6
Kyd, Thomas (Spanish Tragedy) 21
Laclau, Ernesto 227–229
Lake George, New York 228, 231
Lamarr, Hedy 147
Language writers 16, 17n3, 211, 212,
216, 241n3, 241n5
Lastra, James 163n19, 163n22
Laub, Dori (Testimony) 55–57
Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore
Ducasse) 10, 12, 19n14
the Lavender Scare 121, 132n27
Lawson, Thomas 145
Leahy, Mark 215
Leavell, Linda 91n12
Lee, Spike (Bamboozled) 242n19
Levy, Ellen 91n14, 140
Lemon, Jack 154
Life magazine 78, 100
Lipsitz, George 131n21
The Little Review 26
Locke, Graham 209n34
Long, Derek 148
Lopez, Tony 230
Lorca, Federico Garcia 210n44
Lowney, John 94n30, 95n37, 174,
176, 206n8, 208n26
Loy, Mina 62, 91n11
Index  267
Lucas, George (Star Wars) 242n13
lyric poetry 4, 23, 27, 57, 62, 65,
76–77, 86–87, 169, 172, 177,
186–187, 192, 194–198, 203–205,
and the lyric “I” 169, 171, 174–175,
207n15
Mackey, Nathaniel 15, 168–170,
186–205, 209n34, 209n35, 209n36,
209n38, 210n39, 210n41, 210n42,
210n44, 210n46, works: Blue Fasa
191, 210n39 “Cante Moro” 186,
195, Eroding Witness 191, 210n39,
“Fray,” 198, From a Broken Bottle
Traces of Perfume Still Emanate
209n35, “mu” series 191, 197–198,
Nod House 191, 210n39, “On
Edge” 188, 194, “Other: from
Noun to Verb” 189, 206n4, School
of Udhra 191, 202, “Song of the
Andoumboulou” series 168,
169–170, 187, 188, 190–204,
210n39, “Song of the Andoumboulou
1” 192–194, “Song of the
Andoumboulou 10” 194–197, 199,
202, “Song of the Andoumboulou
48” 198–204, “Sound and
Semblance—”mu” twenty-sixth
part—” 198, 200–202, Splay Anthem
191, 193, 197–199, 203, 210n39,
Whatsaid Serif 191, 193, concepts:
“another voice” 186–7, 190, 195,
204, “blutopian” 186, 190–192, 198,
203–204, 209n34, “discrepancy”/
difference 188, 190, 203, “othering”
169, 188–190, 194, 197, 203, 224,
“transcendent lyric” 169, 186–187,
192, 194–195, 198, 203–204,
“versioning” 169,188, 224
Magee, Michael 10, 19n15
Marcantonio, Vito 87
Marey, Etienne Jules 165n36
Marinetti, F. T. 161n4
Mao, Douglas 52n25
May, Elaine Tyler 99
McAlmon, Robert 75, 91n12
McCabe, Susan 66, 71
McCarthyism 168, 171, 175, 183–184,
186, 209n33
McDonald, Dwight (Politics) 102
McGann, Jerome 18n5, 216
Méliès, Georges 145
Melissa Pearl Friedling 161n6
Mellencamp, Patricia 166n39
268 Index
Meyerowtiz, Joanne 131n21
Michelangelo (The Sistine Chapel) 123
Michelson, Annette 39, 139, 162n9
Middleton, Peter 86
Miller, Paul D./DJ Spooky 16, 211,
222–228, 237–238, 240, 242n16,
240n17, 240n18, 243n25, 243n26,
243n27, work: Rebirth of a Nation
16, 222–228, 235, 237, 242n16,
242n17, 242n18, 243n25, 243n26,
243n27
Milton (Paradise Lost) 58, 64, 92n15
Mohammad, K. Silem 10
Molesworth, Charles 91n6
Monroe, Ian 6
Monroe, Marilyn 149, 152–158, 160,
164n28, 164n31, 165n33, 165n35,
166n39, 166n42, as Norma Jean
Baker 149, 154, 155, 157, 164n28,
death of 153–154, 157, 160,
166n39, 166n42, singing “I’m
Through With Love” 149, 153–154,
160, character Sugar “Kane”
Kowalczyk” in Some Like It Hot
154, 165n33
montage 5, 8, 9, 17n1, 26, 36–39, 40,
51n7, 52n25, 52n26, 53n27, 123,
134–135, 160n1, 160n2, 174, 226
Montgomery, Will 54n39
Moon, Michael 140–41
Moore, Marianne 5, 15, 49, 55, 57,
58–76, 77, 79, 86, 89, 90n5, 91n6,
91n10, 91n11, 91n12, 91n13,
91n14, 92n15, 92n16, 92n17,
92n18, 92n19, 92n20, 93n23,
93n26, 93n27, 130n17, works:
“Marriage”15, 58, 63–76, 77,
89, 91n14, 92n17, 92n20, 93n22,
93n24, 93n26, 130n17, “Four
Quartz Crystal Clocks” 59–62
Morris, Daniel 14, 19n17, 20n20
Mulvey, Laura 161n6
music 15–16, 32, 38–39, 60–61,
136, 139, 146–150, 153–155,
163n21, 163n22, 163n23,
165n34, 165n37, 167–205, 206n5,
206n8, 207n13, 207n19, 207n21,
207n26, 208n30, 209n34,
210n47, 224–225, 233, 239,
242n18, 243n24
Muybridge, Eadweard 165n36
mythology: 21, 22, 29, 32, 33, 40,
43, 46, 48–50, 54n37, 54n41, 59,
61–2, 64, 68, 70–72, 82, 88, 90,
92n20, 94n33, 96n43, 99, 104,
106, 107, 115–116, 119, 142,
143, 154, 162n14, figures from
mythology: Actaeon and Diana
34–5, Attis 104, 107, Cybele
104, 106, Mnemosyne 107,
Tereus, Philomela, Procne, and
Ityn 22, 33, World Egg 107–8,
130n16
NAACP (National Association for
the Advancement of Colored
People) 183
names and naming 43–44, 53n32,
176–178, 180, 184, 199–200,
208n23, 209n33, 223, 226–237,
243n22, descriptivist versus
anti-descriptivist concepts of
naming 226–227
National Public Radio 237
Naumberg, Nancy 78
Nealon, Jeffrey T. 241n11
Nelson, Deborah 114
Newport jazz festival 168, 171–175,
185–186
The New York Times 216–222
the “news” 13–14, 20n19, 217–222
Ngai, Sianne 213–214
nostalgia 23, 29, 48–50, 89, 148,
161n6
O’Leary, Peter 209n36, 210n45
Oppen, George 19n11
Orage, A. R. (New Age) 29
Ovid (Metamorphoses) 52n21,
143–144
Owens, Coco 96n43
Parks, Justin 79
Partisan Review 93n28
Patterson, Anita 207n16
pedagogy 9, 14–15, 18n10, 25, 30–31,
46, 168, 177, 188, 204, 242n16,
Perelman, Bob 13–14, 19n16, 19n17,
234, 241n3
Perloff, Marjorie 7–8, 17n1, 211, 218
Pertout, Andrian 210n47
Pervigililum Veneris 22
Phillips, Tom (A Humument) 242n13
photomontage 51n8, 78, 122–123,
132n28
Picasso, Pablo 8, 18n6, work: Still
Life with Newspaper and Packet of
Tobacco 8

Pigott, Michael 147, on Esfir Shub,
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty
161n7
Pindar (“Olympian Odes II”) 32
Playboy magazine 154, 157, 164n28
Pollock, Griselda 57
Popular Front 76, 78, 95n41
Pound, Ezra 4, 14, 15, 26–38, 46–50,
50n5, 51n10, 51n12, 51n13,
51n14, 51n16, 51n17, 52n18,
52n21, 52n22, 62, 65, 128n5, 137,
189, 209n37, 218, 219, 220, 221,
237, 241n9, works: The Cantos
15, 26, 31–32, 33, 35–36, 46,
49, 51n17, “Canto IV” 31–35,
52n18, 54n41, “Malatesta” cantos
221, Cathay—“To-Em-Mei’s ‘The
Unmoving Cloud’” 35, Guide to
Kulchur—“Zweck, or the Aim”
30–32, 51n16, “I Gather the Limbs
of Osiris” 29, “Letter to Iris Barry”
51n13, 209n37, review of Others
anthology 62
Rabaté, Jean-Michel 26–27
Ramazani, Jahan 23
Ransom, John Crowe 129n9
Reed, Brian 18n10, 221
representation 1, 6–7, 28, 42, 48, 78,
80–81, 88, 119, 123, 140, 151, 155,
174, 177, 182, 185, 220, 225
Rocky 160n2
Rolling Stone magazine 21
Rukeyser, Muriel 3, 15, 55, 57, 58,
76–90, 93n28, 94n30, 94n31,
94n34, 95n37, 95n41, 96n43,
works: “Book of the Dead” in
U. S. 1 3, 15, 76–90, The Collected
Poems of Muriel Rukeyser 93n28,
95n38, Theory of Flight 76,
characters in “Book of the Dead”:
Mrs. Jones 81–88, 96n42, Charles
Jones 83, Philipa Allen 83, 96n42
San Francisco 99, 130n19, 210n42,
Mission District 99
Santayana, George 72
Savage, Sean (“Madison News Reel”)
161n7
Scajaj, Leonard 88
Scanlon, Larry 170, 206n8
Schultz, Susan 235
science 28, 38, 57–60, 64, 68–69, 71,
79, 89
Index  269
Seitz, William 6
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 11, 19n11
Sheppard, Robert 217
Sieburth, Richard 31, 51n17
Silliman, Ron 241n5
Sitney, P. Adams 162n10
Smethurst, James 206n8
Some Like it Hot 154, 156, 165n33,
166n42, voted AFI best comedy of
all time 154
Sontag, Susan 57
Sophia (Gnostic goddess of wisdom)
193, 210n45
South Park (“Scott Tenorman Must
Die”) 52n19
Spahr, Julianna 214
Spann, Otis 172
Stewart, Jacqueline 242n18
Stewart, Jesse 225
Stickley, Gustave 109–115, work:
Craftsman Homes 109–113, and
Arts & Crafts movement 112, 114
Sufism 199
Suleiman, Susan Rubin 18n9
Surrealism 10, 41–42, 123
“swing” music 167, 169, 176, 189
syntax 10, 17n2, 21, 46, 63, 66–67,
82, 111, 130n13, 168, 211, 216,
217, 222, 240, 241n5
Taylor, Brandon 6
testimony 15, 55–57, 62, 64, 75,
77, 79–83, 85–89, 94n30, 95n37,
96n42
Thayer, Scofield 91n12
Thoreau, Henry David 228, 231–232
Thurston, Michael 94n29
Tracy, Steven 208n26
Trodd, Tamara 18n6
Tzara, Tristan 12, 19n14
Union Carbide 76–79, 81, 86
US 1: Maine to Florida 94n32
utopianism 10, 15, 25, 29, 38, 101,
128, 148, 169, 181, 186, 188,
190–192, 197–198, 202–204,
209n34, 210n41, 225
van Vechten, Carl 208n27
Vietnam War, protests against 113,
204, 219
Vidal 34–35
visuality 9, 15, 21, 24, 36–37, 50n1,
78–81, 84–86, 95n36, 136, 146,
270 Index
157–158, 161n6, 162n14, 222,
224–225, 230, 233–235, 237–239,
243n21
von Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness
Elsa 91n11
Wagner, Richard (Ring Cycle)
50n4
Waldman, Diane 6
Walker, Eric 63
War Information Board 78
Warhol, Andy 14, 166n39
Warner, Michael 18n5, 98–99, 105,
114, 121, 129n8
Waters, Muddy 172
Watten, Barrett 120
Wees, William 152
Weschler, Shoshana 80
Weston, Jessie L. (From Ritual to
Romance) 21
Wershler, Darren 11–12
Wescher, Herta 5
“When the Saints Go Marching
In” 182
White, Jenny 229
White, Margaret Bourke (You Have
Seen Their Faces) 78
Williams, William Carlos 1
Willis, Patricia 91n12
Wilson, Woodrow 223
WPA (Works Progress
Administration) 78, 94n32
Yau, John 117
Zamsky, Robert 196